Integration of Magnetic Particle Imaging in Anisotropic Navigation Platform for Tracking of Magnetic Nanoparticles

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI)-based navigation is an attractive method to improve the performance of magnetic drug targeting. Almost all existing navigation systems have isotropic/symmetric structures with multiple orthogonal pairs of coils, where the field-free point (FFP) can be easily calculated and controlled. However, the electromagnetic actuation (EMA) function of the existing navigation system is not precise enough and does not have a sufficient number of degree-of-freedoms (DOFs) for three-dimensional (3D) manipulation. The difficulties of FFP estimation in other system structures are limited to the integration of MPI function. In this paper, we present a method for FFP generation using an anisotropic system with different numbers of coils (4, 6, 9). A selected EMA system is then integrated with the MPI module to perform the particle tracking application in both in vitro and in vivo. Our methodology will allow the current existing EMA systems to improve their functionalities which are capable of simultaneous manipulation and localization of magnetic nanoparticles with resolution of around 1mm.