In a method and magnetic resonance imaging apparatus wherein magnetic resonance signals are simultaneously received from an examination subject by multiple reception coils, a single, uninterrupted pulse sequence is executed which includes reference scans of the subject with a first sequence kernel that is optimized for coil sensitivity calibration, immediately followed by a series of accelerated image scans with a second sequence kernel, different from the first sequence kernel, that is optimized for imaging. Coil sensitivity maps for the respective coils are calculated from the data acquired in the reference scans, and an image of the subject is reconstructed by operating on the image data with a parallel reconstruction algorithm employing the calculated coil sensitivity maps.