A Novel Electromagnetic Actuation System for Magnetic Nanoparticle Guidance in Blood Vessels

Targeted drug delivery using magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) is a new therapeutic method and is being improved continually. However, recent improvements have focused mainly on the introduction and synthesis of special drugs and there are still limitations getting a drug to desired locations in the body, primarily owing to the small size of nanoparticles and the difficulty of controlling their movement in the body. This paper introduces a new electromagnetic actuation system for guiding MNPs in blood vessels. This system uses six electromagnets powered by currents that can generate a high-gradient magnetic field in the desired direction. A differential current coil (DCC) approach is used to calculate the current applied to each coil. Due to properties of the DCC approach, it is possible to use soft iron cores at the centers of the coils to amplify and concentrate the magnetic field in the desired region and generate a stronger magnetic force than the existing coil systems. To evaluate the performance of the actuation system, a model that guided nanoscale magnetic particles inside special channels was studied using commercial software. To improve the efficiency of the electromagnets for MNP guidance, the structural parameters of the cores and coils were chosen based on the simulation results to get the largest magnetic force in the region of interest, which was set as size of the mouse brain. The proposed actuation system is very compact and less expensive than previous systems. Furthermore, the simulation results demonstrated that the actuation system can generate adequate magnetophoretic forces for nanoparticle steering in a Y-shaped vascular model and can be potentially used as a propulsion tool for MNP guidance in blood vessels.