Implementation of a High-Precision 2-D Receiving Coil Set for Magnetic Particle Imaging

In the medical imaging technique magnetic particle imaging, tomographic images of the spatial distribution of superparamagnetic particles are produced in real time. To generate images in a plane, the particles are excited in two dimensions. A specific particle response can be measured via receiving coils and the measured signal gives quantitative information about the particle distribution and local concentration. To achieve a high-spatial resolution with x-space reconstruction, the receiving coils have to feature a preferably homogeneous sensitivity in the field of view. To achieve this for a cylindrical bore, which is the typical medical scenario, an optimized coil set is implemented and tested in this paper. Two orthogonal receiving coil pairs are wound inside a negative form, which is custom made by a 3-D printer. Further, a well performing receiving chain is utilized, which transmits the particle signal from the receiving coils to the data acquisition unit. For performance evaluation, a hardware phantom with three delta samples is used. A field free line is chosen as a selection field, for which the presented coils may be used in an application scenario. The receiving coils perform well in the sense that no coupling in between the data paths is apparent and the recorded signals clearly represent the used phantom.