Vascular MPI: visualization and tracking of rapidly moving samples

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a fast imaging technique for the visualization of the distribution of superparamagnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) in 3D. For spatial encoding, a field free area is moved rapidly through the field of view (FOV) generating a localized signal. Fast moving samples, e.g., a bolus of SPIONs traveling through the large veins in the human body carried by blood flow with velocities in the order of ~45 cm/s and higher, cause temporal blurring in MPI measurements using common sequences and reconstruction techniques. This hampers the evaluation of dynamics of rapidly moving samples. In this abstract, initial results of rapidly moving samples in form of SPION boluses visualized within an MPI scanner are shown.