Fundamental Imaging performance of magnetic particle imaging system using high-Tc superconducting coils

We investigated the fundamental imaging performance of the developed high temperature superconductor (HTS) MPI system with 120 mm bore diameter. The full width at half maximum, which is related to the spatial resolution of the image, was 30 mm under the gradient field of 0.34 T/m. Note that the gradient field can be easily increased by increasing the number of turns of the HTS selection field coils since the power consumption and the mass of the HTS coils are very low. We also obtained the reasonable limit of detection as 48 micro-g(Fe). Since the power consumption and the mass of MPI scanner can be dramatically reduced by using HTS tape compared with those made of Cu wire, a HTS MPI scanner is one of the promising candidates for the realization of human-body-sized MPI scanner.