Design and Implementation of Low-Cost Distributed Tabletop Magnetic Particle Imaging System

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a novel tomography model that mainly benefits from the nonlinear magnetization response of magnetic nanoparticles under a dramatically changing magnetic field. Low-cost and compact system construction is beneficial to the application of education, biomedical research, preclinical and clinical medicine. Conversely, many aspects of the production cost, infrastructure requirements, and distributed measurements can be prohibitively expensive for them. In this article, a low-cost, compact tabletop MPI scanner based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) framework with an Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) cores was proposed to address these issues. First, the proposed low-cost MPI scanner was realized by substituting discrete elements, which is affordable to cover the most economically underdeveloped regions. Besides, the ARM cores embedded in the FPGA framework which has the inherent advantages of low-power operation, are exploited to execute high-power real-time data transmission tasks instead of conventional X86. And a customized tabletop MPI system was constructed via the proposed architecture for advanced distributed MPI research. Simulative vessel experiments with commercial superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPIONs) have been performed in the proposed system by vessel phantoms. The experimental images showed that the proposed system could achieved an image resolution of approximately 2 mm, which can distinguish spatial locations of brain veins (2–4 mm in diameter). Moreover, the experiment of distributed transmission showed that the proposed system could perform the collection and transmission of distributed particle signals based on the inherent user datagram protocol (UDP) network transmission protocol with an average round trip time (RTT) of 28.044 ms. Hence, the proposed system has the potential to apply the network cloud to get distributed biomedical information for remote education or diagnosis.