Magnetic nanoparticle imaging using multiple electron paramagnetic resonance activation sequences.

Magnetic nanoparticles play an important role in several biomedical applications such as hyperthermia, drug targeting, and disease detection. To realize an effective working of these applications, the spatial distribution of the particles needs to be accurately known, in a noninvasive way. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) is a promising and sensitive measurement technique for recovering these distributions. In the conventional approach, EPR is applied with a homogeneous magnetic field. In this paper, we employ different heterogeneous magnetic fields that allow to stabilize the solution of the associated inverse problem and to obtain localized spatial information. A comparison is made between the two approaches and our novel adaptation shows an average increase in reconstruction quality by 5% and is 12 times more robust towards noise. Furthermore, our approach allows to speed up the EPR measurements while still obtaining reconstructions with an improved accuracy and noise robustness compared to homogeneous EPR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]