1. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system comprising: an MRI gantry having static and gradient magnet assemblies and at least one radio frequency (RF) coil defining an image volume; MRI control circuits connected to control components within said MRI gantry and configured to effect MRI data acquisition sequences of RF and gradient magnetic pulses which elicit MRI signals to acquire and process said elicited MRI signals into MR image data; said MRI control circuits being configured to (a) acquire multi-dimensional MR k-space data using multiple data acquisition subsequences for each of multiple time to inversion (TI) intervals without using an injected contrast agent; (b) reconstruct said acquired k-space data into a series of spatial domain MR image data each having different TI intervals; (c) perform an analysis of TI dependence of signal intensity, based on the series of the spatial domain MR image data; and (d) store and/or display a result of the analysis.