Tracer design for magnetic particle imaging (invited)

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) uses safe iron oxide nanoparticle tracers to offer fundamentally new capabilities for medical imaging, in applications as vascular imaging and ultra-sensitive cancer therapeutics. MPI is perhaps the first medical imaging platform to intrinsically exploit nanoscale material properties. MPI tracers contain magnetic nanoparticles whose tunable, size-dependent magnetic properties can be optimized by selecting a particular particle size and narrow size-distribution. In this paper we present experimental MPI measurements acquired using a homemade MPI magnetometer: a zero-dimensional MPI imaging system designed to characterize tracer performance by measuring the derivative of the time-varying tracer magnetization, M'(H(t)), at a driving frequency of 25 kHz. We show that MPI performance is optimized by selecting phase-pure magnetite tracers of a particular size and narrow size distribution; in this work, tracers with 20 nm median diameter, log-normal distribution shape parameter, σ(v), equal to 0.26, and hydrodynamic diameter equal to 30 nm showed the best performance. Furthermore, these optimized MPI tracers show 4 × greater signal intensity (measured at the third harmonic) and 20% better spatial resolution compared with commercial nanoparticles developed for MRI.