1. A magnetic resonance imaging method comprising: a) using a magnetic resonance imaging system to excite a field of view (FOV) for a target being imaged; b) using an excitation plan to limit said excited FOV to selected bands of magnetization; c) simultaneously exciting multiple said selected bands of magnetization within a single slice; d) applying phase encoding along a shortest FOV dimension; e) simultaneously acquiring a signal from each said excited selected band of magnetization; and f) combining different strips of said magnetization into a composite image to reconstruct and output a target image from said acquired signal.