A system and method for medical imaging includes an improvement to the
MP-RAGE pulse sequence that enables the readout bandwidth thereof to be
matched to that of other pulse sequences used in the same examination
without a significant loss in SNR. More specifically, the present
invention includes using a multi-echo MP-RAGE pulse sequence in which
multiple gradient-recalled NMR signals are acquired at the desired
"matching" bandwidth and combining selected ones of the NMR signals to
reconstruct an image. By selecting and combining NMR signals acquired at
each phase encoding, the SNR of the resulting reconstructed image can be
maintained.