Patent ID: 7545966

Claim:
A method, comprising: controlling a magnetic resonance imaging apparatus to perform actions comprising: accessing a set of non-rectilinearly sampled k-space data; creating an estimated image phase map φ e from an image reconstructed from central k-space data in the set of non-rectilinearly sampled k-space data; distributing the set of non-rectilinearly-sampled k-space data on a rectilinear k-space grid without using a k-space gridding interpolation technique to produce a set of distributed data; and repeating steps within the following curly brackets: { inverse Fourier transforming the set of distributed data to produce a set of inverse-Fourier transformed data; updating the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data by setting to zero a selected portion of the inverse-Fourier transformed data; updating the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data by imposing a phase constraint on a central portion of the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data, where the phase constraint comports with: I new =|I old |*exp ( iφ e ) where Inew=image value at a pixel after imposing the phase constraint, and where Iold=image value at a pixel before imposing the phase constraint; Fourier transforming the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data to produce an updated set of distributed data; updating the updated set of distributed data at grid points associated with the selected portion of the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data by selectively replacing a current value at a grid point with a value from the set of distributed data; } until a difference between a current version of the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data and a previous version of the set of inverse-Fourier transformed data is less than a threshold.