An atlas-free magnetic resonance imaging method images at least one part of a brain. An MRI sequence configured for acquiring two image volumes of the part at different inversion times within a single acquisition is combined to a fat-water separation method for acquiring a fat-water separated image. For each echo time two image volumes are acquired, respectively a first image volume and a second image volume at the first echo time, and a first image volume and a second image volume at the second echo time, and combined to a uniform image. The acquired images are combined to form a final uniform image, a final fat-water separated image, and a final second image volume that are fed into a multichannel image segmentation algorithm using a Markov random field model for segmenting the part into multiple classes of cranial tissues, in order to obtain a segmented image of said part.
