Systems and methods for adaptive, multi-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”), in which an MRI scan prescription is adaptively changed to acquire high-quality data from select regions-of-interest (“ROI”) in a larger field-of-view (“FOV”), are provided. The higher quality data can include data representing higher spatial resolution, higher signal-to-noise ratio (“SNR”), increased diffusion encoding via repeated acquisition with a larger number of diffusion-encoding directions, and so on. A composite image can be generated that displays the higher quality images of the ROIs overlaid on the larger FOV.