Effects of excitation coil configurations in magnetorelaxometry imaging of magnetic nanoparticles

Magnetorelaxometry imaging of magnetic nanoparticles is a promising technique for detecting the distribution of these particles in order to monitor novel cancer therapy approaches. The imaging is based on the reconstruction of the particle distribution from signals measured with several SQUID sensors. For a practical application, suitable configurations of the sensor and excitation setup need to be defined. In this paper, the influence of the excitation coil configuration on the imaging quality is investigated in simulation studies. In this respect, the number, diameter, arrangement, and shape of the coils are regarded. The results show that increasing the number of coils will improve the reconstruction result. Simulations with different coil diameters show an improvement with smaller coil diameters. Our simulations reveal a minor influence of the arrangement and the shape of the coils.