Perspectives on clinical magnetic particle imaging

After realizing the worlds' first preclinical magnetic particle imaging (MPI) demonstrator, Philips is now realizing the worlds' first whole-body clinical prototype to prove the feasibility of MPI for clinical imaging. After a brief introduction of the basic MPI imaging process, this contribution presents an overview on the determining factors for key properties, i.e., spatial resolution, acquisition speed, sensitivity, and quantitativeness, and how these properties are influenced by scaling up from preclinical to clinical instrumentation. Furthermore, it is discussed how this scale up affects the physiological compatibility of the method as well as hardware parameters such as power requirements for drive field generation, selection and focus field generation, and the design of the receive chain of the MPI device.