Frequency-selective signal enhancement by a passive dual coil resonator for magnetic particle imaging.

Objective.Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) visualizes the spatial distribution of magnetic nanoparticles. MPI already provides excellent temporal and good spatial resolution, however, to achieve translation into clinics, further advances in the fields of sensitivity, image reconstruction and tracer performance are needed. In this work, we propose a novel concept to enhance the MPI signal and image resolution by a purely passive receive coil insert for a preclinical MPI system.Approach.The passive dual coil resonator (pDCR) provides frequency-selective signal enhancement. This is enabled by the adaptable resonance frequency of the pDCR network, which is galvanically isolated from the MPI system and composed of two coaxial solenoids connected via a capacitor. The pDCR aims to enhance frequency components related to high mixing orders, which are crucial to achieve high spatial resolution.Main Results.In this study, system matrix measurements and image acquisitions of a resolution phantom are carried out to evaluate the performance of the pDCR compared to the integrated receive unit of the preclinical MPI and a dedicated rat-sized receive coil. Frequency-selective signal increase and spatial resolution enhancement are demonstrated.Significance.Common dedicated receive coils come along with noise-matched receive networks, which makes them costly and difficult to reproduce. The presented pDCR is a purely passive coil insert that gets along without any additional receive electronics. Therefore, it is cost-efficient, easy-to-handle and adaptable to other MPI scanners and potentially other applications providing the basis for a new breed of passive MPI receiver systems.

Flow velocity quantification by exploiting the principles of the Doppler effect and magnetic particle imaging.

Changes in blood flow velocity play a crucial role during pathogenesis and progression of cardiovascular diseases. Imaging techniques capable of assessing flow velocities are clinically applied but are often not accurate, quantitative, and reliable enough to assess fine changes indicating the early onset of diseases and their conversion into a symptomatic stage. Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) promises to overcome these limitations. Existing MPI-based techniques perform velocity estimation on the reconstructed images, which restricts the measurable velocity range. Therefore, we developed a novel velocity quantification method by adapting the Doppler principle to MPI. Our method exploits the velocity-dependent frequency shift caused by a tracer motion-induced modulation of the emitted signal. The fundamental theory of our method is deduced and validated by simulations and measurements of moving phantoms. Overall, our method enables robust velocity quantification within milliseconds, with high accuracy, no radiation risk, no depth-dependency, and extended range compared to existing MPI-based velocity quantification techniques, highlighting the potential of our method as future medical application.

Multifrequency magnetic particle imaging enabled by a combined passive and active drive field feed-through compensation approach.

PURPOSE: Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) allows fast imaging of the spatial distribution of superparamagnetic iron-oxide based nanoparticles (SPIONs). Recent research suggests that MPI furthermore promises in-vivo access to environmental parameters of SPIONs as temperature or viscosity. Various medical applications as nanomedicine, stem cell-based therapies or magnetic hyperthermia could benefit from in-vivo multiparameter estimation by MPI. One possible approach to get access to functional parameters is particle excitation at multiple frequencies. To enable the investigation of the mentioned approach, a novel MPI device capable of multifrequency excitation is needed. METHODS: MPI usually employs analog band-stop filters to cancel the drive field feed-through, which is magnitudes higher than the particle signal. To enable drive field frequency flexibility over a wide bandwidth, we propose a combined passive and active drive field feed-through compensation approach. This cancellation technique further allows the direct detection of the SPIONs' signal at the fundamental excitation frequency. RESULTS: A combined feed-through suppression of up to -125 dB is reported, which allows to adjust the drive field frequency from 500 Hz to 20 kHz. Initial spectroscopic measurements and images are shown that demonstrate the concept of multifrequency excitation and prove the imaging capability of the presented scanner. A mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement by the factor of 1.7 was shown when the first harmonic is used for measurement-based image reconstruction compared to when it is omitted. CONCLUSIONS: In this paper, the first one-dimensional multifrequency magnetic particle imaging (mf-MPI) that features adjustable excitation frequencies from 500 Hz to 20 kHz is presented. The device will be used to study the principle of multiparameter estimation by employing multifrequency excitation.