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.