Patent Document ID: 8046044
Application ID: 11211397
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of acquiring medical image data of a patient's region of interest, the method comprising: acquiring, by a magnetic resonance (MR) scanner, an image data series of a patient's region of interest starting from an initial table position in a coordinate system corresponding to a table position for the MR scanner, the image data series comprising a plurality of MR image slices, the image slices having a predetermined skip therebetween, each image slice having a predetermined slice thickness; repeating the acquiring step using the same image slice thickness and the same skip between image slices with an adjusted initial table position in the coordinate system until a desired degree of overlap between the plurality of acquired image data series is achieved; aggregating the plurality of image slices from the plurality of acquired image data series into a composite data file, wherein each image slice in the composite data file comprises header information; and automatically sorting the image slices in the composite data file by the table position at which each image slice was acquired by executing a software program configured to process each image slice's header information to identify how the image slices are to be sorted by the table position at which each image slice was acquired.