1. A method for producing magnetic resonance imaging data, comprising: acquiring a series of M images at a plurality of echo times using a multi-echo pulse sequence, wherein a compensation gradient is added as a blipped gradient in the slice direction before the first image acquisition and between each subsequent image acquisitions to compensate for static magnetic field inhomogeneities; repeating the step of acquiring the series of M images N times, wherein the compensation gradient is set to a predetermined value for each acquisition; combining the N acquired images for each of the M echo times to obtain M corrected images; computing a map of T 2 * values from the M corrected images; and storing data representing at least a portion of: the N*M acquired images, the M corrected images and the map of T 2 * values.