Patent ID: 8803523

Claim:
A method of ordering slices for interleaved magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), comprising: a. selecting a number of interleaved slice locations (N S ) using an MRI machine, wherein each said interleaved slice comprises a plurality of excitations (N E,S ) where S is the slice number between 1 and N S and N E,S may differ for different slice numbers; b. selecting an excitation duration (T S ) of each said excitation in each said slice using said MRI machine; c. selecting a repetition time (TR) using said MRI machine between successive excitations of the same slice, wherein said TR has a duration of N i ×T S , wherein N i is the number of interleaved slices per TR period; and d. arranging the order for said slices such that the total scan time (T) is minimized such that TR is the product of N i and T s , wherein said N i can be arbitrarily chosen between 1 and N T /N E,max wherein N T is the total number of excitations for all said slices and wherein N E,max is the maximum number of said excitations for one said slice.