Insight in scanner construction for a dynamical field free line for magnetic particle imaging

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a new imaging modality capable of visualizing the distribution of super-paramagnetic nanoparticles while achieving high spatial and temporal resolution. It promises medical application for high-contrast angiography and cancer imaging. MPI was first published in 2005 and shows a fast development in hardware design, spatial encoding schemes and reconstruction techniques. Commonly, a magnetic field configuration with a field free point (FFP) is used to enable spatial encoding. At lower particle concentrations, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) decreases to a critical range. An enhanced spatial encoding scheme uses a field free line (FFL) and promises to improve the sensitivity by one order of magnitude. The presented work describes the manufacturing of an optimized scanner topology that realizes a FFL with excellent field quality. Based on curved rectangular coils the power loss is efficiently minimized and high field quality accomplished. Furthermore, an overview of the structure and setup of the signal chain is demonstrated, which is a critical element in MPI imaging. Both, field generating part and signal chain give important insights on future FFL imaging.