A system and method for detecting atherosclerotic plaque hemorrhage includes a controller programmed to apply a non-selective inversion recovery RF pulse to a region of interest, apply a plurality of encoding sequences to the region of interest to cause generation of a plurality of echoes during application of each encoding sequence. The controller is further programmed to acquire three dimensional MR data from the region of interest during generation of each of the plurality of echoes, identify a hemorrhage based on the three dimensional MR data, characterize a type of the hemorrhage, and reconstruct an image based on the three dimensional MR data, the image comprising the characterized hemorrhage.