Patent ID: 7003343

Claim:
A method of accelerating volumetric MR imaging of arteries or other structures comprising the following: a) an image volume having x, y and z orthogonal coordinates and a thickness along z=Tv; b) for every x, y location within the volume the structures to be imaged have a thickness Ts<Tv; c) three-dimensional k space sampling is accelerated by a factor F≦Tv/Ts by increasing the spacing of k space sampling along kz by a factor of F while maintaining the sampling spatial frequency ranges unchanged; d) reconstruct with 3-D Fourier Transformation utilizing a field of view in the z direction which is equal to Tv/F; e) create 1/F duplicate copies of the reconstructed volumetric data and stacked together adjacent to each other in the z direction; and f) post-process the combined multiple copies of volumetric data to select a subset of the total combined volume containing a single complete data set of the structures of interest.