Bruker has announced the world’s first Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) scanner. The scanner is intended to be a new complementary technology for preclinical imaging of small animals. It is codeveloped and comarketed with Royal Philips, manufactured by Bruker and will ship this year.

The key enabling technology of MPI is a tracer that produces a signal that is imaged by a magnetic scanning system. The detected signal is proportional to the concentration of magnetized particles in the field-free point, which is the only point in the 3D imaging volume where the magnetic field is zero. Changes in magnetization are only able to be seen at this point. “In order to turn this into an imaging method, all we need to do is move the field-free point through space until we have covered our volume of interest, and then generate an image from the signals measured at points on a grid in space,” said Thorsten Thiel, director of Marketing Communications. The resulting 3D image is of the concentration of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles that have been injected into the animal’s bloodstream.

Bruker is targeting several applications with the scanner, including cardiac assessment, molecular imaging, and organ, lung, liver and brain perfusion analysis. The scanner is intended for use with other preclinical imaging techniques. Although MPI does not provide high resolution anatomical reference image information, it produces high resolution images in seconds, allowing researchers to study processes as they occur. “We foresee the MPI system being installed in preclinical research labs that often collaborate with, or are incorporated into, university hospitals,” said Dr. Thiel.