The present invention is directed to a system and method for magnetic resonance imaging including an extended Fourier transform-based velocity-selective pulse train design with a pair of refocusing pulses within each velocity encoding step and accompanying phase cycling between different velocity encoding steps. The present invention is robust to B0/B1 field inhomogen-city and eddy current effects. The utility of this technique, through a velocity-selective inversion pulse, is demonstrated in a 2D velo-city-selective arterials spin labeling study, which shows a reasonable agreement in CBF quantification with the standard PCASL method.
