Efficient Field-Free Line Generation for Magnetic Particle Imaging

Signal encoding in magnetic particle imaging is accomplished by moving a field-free point (FFP) through the region of interest. Due to saturation effects, only the particles in a certain region around the FFP contribute to the measurement signals induced in receive coils. The sensitivity of MPI depends on the gradient strength of the FFP field. Recently, a new signal encoding scheme was proposed, which has the potential to significantly increase the sensitivity of the method by taking advantage of a field-free line (FFL). However, the proposed coil assembly used to generate the FFL was unfeasible in practice due to high electrical power losses. In this work, we show that the efficiency of the setup can be considerably improved by reducing the number of coils.