A Novel Design of an MPI-Based Guidance System for Simultaneous Actuation and Monitoring of Magnetic Nanoparticles

Targeted drug delivery by using magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) is an efficient technique to deliver drug molecules to specific tissues in a human body. An electromagnetic actuation system is a promising solution for applying an adequate force to steer the MNPs in the blood vessels in a noninvasive way. In this paper, a combined actuation and monitoring system is proposed to provide a closed-loop nanoparticle localization of the MNPs on the basis of magnetic particle imaging (MPI) for more precise targeting. The MNPs can be steered by applying a magnetic field gradient provided by the actuation system and monitored by applying the drive and selection fields to the actuation coils by using a time division multiplexing scheme. The aim of this paper is mainly to investigate the feasibility of combining the actuation system with an MPI system by using numerical simulations and optimizing hardware constraints. The challenge in this research is to sequence the actuation signal and the MPI signal to perform both tasks simultaneously. The COMSOL Multiphysics software is used for modeling and simulation of the proposed system. The simulation results showed the feasibility of the MPI-based actuation system. The proposed system will provide simultaneous navigation and tracking for targeted drug delivery of MNPs in compact and efficient ways.