Influence of the Receive Channel Number on the Spatial Resolution in Magnetic Particle Imaging

Abstract

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a fast and highly sensitive tomographic imaging modality. When applying 3D Lissajous imaging sequences, the region of interest is rapidly sampled by moving a field-free point along a predefined trajectory. Since the field excitation is done using three orthogonal excitation coils, usually also the magnetization response is measured with three independent and orthogonal receive coils. In this work the influence of selecting a subset of receive channels during reconstruction on the resulting image quality is analyzed. It is shown that using a single receive channel a slight loss of spatial resolution in the order of 12–22% in the direction perpendicular to the receiving direction can be observed while in direction of the receive coil the resolution is preserved and partially even improved. Since the construction of decoupled 3D receive coil units is a major engineering effort, the findings can be used to simplify the construction of 3D Lissajous type scanners.