TWO-DIMENSIONAL PHASE-CONJUGATE SYMMETRY RECONSTRUCTION FOR 3D SPIN-WARP, ECHO-PLANAR AND ECHO-VOLUME MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING

A non-rectangular central kernel (200, 400, 500) of magnetic resonance image data is collected and stored in an acquired data memory (44). A non-rectangular peripheral portion (210, 410, 510) of magnetic resonance image data adjacent the central kernel (200) is collected and stored in the acquired data memory (44). A phase correction data value set (54) is generated from at least a portion of the central and peripheral data value sets. A synthetic conjugately symmetric data set (220, 420, 520) is generated (60) from the peripheral data set and phase corrected (60) using the phase correction data value set (54). Unsampled corners of k-space are zero filled. The central, peripheral, and conjugately symmetric data sets are combined (80) to form a combined data set. The combined data'set is Fourier transformed (82) to form an intermediate image representation (84), which may be exported for display (90) or used for a further iteration. In this manner, a significant amount of data in a central region of k-space that contributes most strongly to the resultant image is collected while significantly reducing data acquisition time.