Single-Sided Magnetic Particle Imaging Device With Field-Free-Line Geometry for In Vivo Imaging Applications

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) has shown great promise to surpass the existing in vivo imaging modalities in some clinical applications. However, one of the challenges to MPI being translated into clinical practice has been the ability to scale up the selection-field coils to surround a human body while being able to generate and drive a sufficiently strong magnetic field gradient. These requirements impose safety concerns as well as prohibitively high-power consumption in the devices with a large cylindrical volume. Therefore, we consider an alternative approach such as a single-sided topology, in which all the hardware is located on one side of the imaging volume accommodating larger subjects. Moreover, different from the previously implemented field-free point single-sided scanners, we realized a field-free-line geometry providing, in principle, a higher signal with a factor of 10 and benefiting from a more robust back-projection image-reconstruction technique. In this work, we present and characterize a first prototype of a single-sided MPI device with the field-free-line geometry suited for the in vivo imaging of the small animals as well as the regions of interest in humans.