In nowadays Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) signal detection and excitation happens at the same time. This concept, however, leads to strong coupling of the drive (excitation) field (DF) with the receive chain. As the induced DF signal is several orders of magnitude higher, special measures have to be taken to suppress this signal portion within the receive signal to keep the required dynamic range of the subsequent analog to digital conversion in a technically feasible range. For "frequency space MPI" high-order band-stop-filters have been successfully used to remove the DF signals, which unfortunately as well removes the fundamental harmonic components of the signal of the magnetic nanoparticles (MNP). According to the Langevin theory the fundamental harmonic component has a large signal contribution and is important for direct reconstruction of the particle concentration. In order to separate the fundamental harmonic component of the MNP from the induced DF signal, different concepts have been proposed using signal cancelation based on additional DF signals, also in combination with additional filtering. In this paper, we propose a field-cancelation (FC) concept in which a receive coil (RC) consists of a series connection of a primary coil in combination with an additional cancelation coil. The geometry of the primary coil was chosen to be sensitive for the MNP signal while the cancelation coil was chosen to minimize the overall inductive coupling of the FC-RC with the DF. Sensitivity plots and mutual coupling coefficients were calculated using a thin-wire approximation. A prototype FC-RC was manufactured and effectiveness of the reduction of the mutual inductive coupling (d) was tested in an existing mouse MPI scanner. The difference between simulations (ds =70 dB) and the measurements (dms =55 dB) indicated the feasibility as well as the need for further investigations.
Keywords: MPI; Magnetic Particle Imaging; field cancelation; receive coil.