International Journal on Magnetic Particle Imaging IJMPI
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017): Int J Mag Part Imag
Towards a mechanical MPI scanner based on atomic magnetometry
Main Article Content
Copyright (c) 2017 Simone Colombo, Victor Nikolaevich Lebedev, Alexey Tonyushkin, Zoran Dragan Grujic, Vladimir Dolgovskiy, Antoine Weis
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
We report on our progress in the development of an atomic magnetometer (AM) based low-frequency X-space MPI scanner, expected to be free from SAR and PNS constraints. We address major challenges in coil and sensor design due to specific AM properties. Compared to our previous work we have changed the AM’s mode of operation towards its implementation for detecting weak SPIO response fields in the presence of nearby-located strong drive/selection fields. We demonstrate that a pump-probe AM scheme in a buffer gas filled alkali vapour cell can tolerate mT/m gradients while maintaining a sensitivity in the one-digit pT/Hz^1/2 range over a bandwidth from DC to several kHz. We give a detailed description of the drive/selection coils’ geometry and their hardware implementations that will provide both field-free-line (FFL) and field-free-point (FFP) modes of operation, compatible with a best performance AM operation. We estimate the achievable field of view and spatial resolution of the scanner as well as its sensitivity, assuming mechanical scanning of a Resovist sample through the field-free point/line.