Advancements in magnetic nanoparticle reconstruction using sequential activation of excitation coil arrays using magnetorelaxometry

Magnetic nanoparticles can be employed for a broad range of biomedical applications where the knowledge of the distribution of the magnetic nanoparticles is of importance for efficacy, patient’s safety, etc. The need exists to have an as accurate as possible quantification of the unknown particles distribution. Magnetorelaxometry (MRX) measurements are able to measure the magnetic induction originating from a certain distribution of magnetically activated nanoparticles. Starting from these measurements it is possible to determine the distribution using a minimum norm estimation technique. This approach is however ill-posed. We sequentially activate the magnetic nanoparticles through the use of excitation coil arrays with the aim to reduce the ill-posedness. This paper presents some advancements in magnetic nanoparticle reconstruction in terms of reconstruction quality using numerical simulations. The results show that inhomogeneous sequential activation is a proper alternative to homogeneous activation with Helmholtz coils since an increase in accuracy with a factor ranging from 1.5 until 2 is obtained. The presented numerical techniques coupled to MRX measurements can be of significant aid so to have more quantitative knowledge of the biodistribution.