Patent ID: 7382127

Claim:
An MRI apparatus comprising: a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system having a plurality of gradient coils positioned about a bore of a magnet to impress a polarizing magnetic field and an RF transceiver system and an RF switch controlled by a pulse module to transmit RF signals to an RF coil assembly to acquire MR images; and a computer programmed to: for each of a plurality of receiver coils: (A) acquire k-space data to partially fill a k-space blade of a plurality of k-space data lines extending through a central region of k-space; (B) apply a 1D Fourier Transform to the k-space data lines in a frequency encoding direction to transform the partially filled k-space blade into a partially filled hybrid space blade; and (C) fill a remainder of the partially filled hybrid space blade with data determined from that acquired and transformed in each of the plurality of receiver coils to obtain a filled hybrid space blade.