First in vivo traveling wave magnetic particle imaging of a beating mouse heart

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a non-invasive imaging modality for direct detection of superparamagnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles based on the nonlinear magnetization response of magnetic materials to alternating magnetic fields. This highly sensitive and rapid method allows both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the measured signal. Since the first publication of MPI in 2005 several different scanner concepts have been presented and in 2009 the first in vivo imaging results of a beating mouse heart were shown. However, since the field of view (FOV) of the first MPI-scanner only covers a small region several approaches and hardware enhancements were presented to overcome this issue and could increase the FOV on cost of acquisition speed. In 2014 an alternative scanner concept, the traveling wave MPI (TWMPI), was presented, which allows scanning an entire mouse-sized volume at once. In this paper the first in vivo imaging results using the TWMPI system are presented. By optimizing the trajectory the temporal resolution is sufficiently high to resolve the dynamic of a beating mouse heart.