Patent ID: 7358730

Claim:
A method for producing a set of diffusion weighted images of a subject positioned in a field of view (FOV) of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, the steps comprising: a) acquiring with the MRI system a set of projection views of the subject positioned in the FOV using a pulse sequence with a motion sensitizing gradient directed along a first direction the set of projection views forming an undersampled image data set; b) repeating step a) a plurality of times, wherein the motion sensitizing gradient is directed along a different direction each time and the projection views are all interleaved; c) producing a composite image with projection views from a plurality of the undersampled image data sets wherein a value at each composite image pixel indicates information about the subject positioned in the FOV; d) reconstructing a diffusion weighted image of the subject from each undersampled image data set by; d)i) backprojecting acquired projection views in the undersampled image data set into the FOV and weighting the value backprojected into each image pixel by the value of the corresponding pixel in the composite image; and d)ii) summing the backprojected values for each image pixel; and e) calculating a diffusion tensor from the diffusion weighted images.