1-D Imaging of a Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticle Distribution by a Single-Sided FFL Magnetic Particle Imaging Scanner

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is an emerging imaging modality that has a potential of complimenting other imaging modalities in clinical practice. Despite many efforts to scale up MPI hardware to date, no MPI systems have been demonstrated to accommodate full-body imaging. Previously, we introduced hardware and characterized a prototype of a single-sided MPI scanner, where all coils are confined to a single side of the device, which provides a subject with unrestricted access to the scanning area although with a limited penetration depth. The major difference in our design from the first reported single-sided scanner is in incorporating a field-free line (FFL) instead of a field-free point (FFP), which generally promises higher sensitivity and more robust image reconstruction. However, as inherent to any single-sided configurations the fields in our device are spatially inhomogeneous making it challenging to apply existing imaging techniques. For our specific geometry, we implemented spatial encoding scheme and imaging in time domain making the image reconstruction fast. In this work, we present 1-D imaging of multiple rods phantoms with a single-sided FFL MPI scanner. The results demonstrate that our scanner is capable of 1-D imaging of phantoms with a spatial resolution of at least 7 mm without image processing.