Abstract #1857

High Contrast, Quantitative Stem Cell Tracking with Magnetic Particle Imaging

Bo Zheng¹, Tandis Vazin¹,², Wisely Yang¹, Patrick W. Goodwill¹, Emine U. Saritas¹, Laura R. Croft¹, David V. Schaffer,¹², Steven M. Conolly³,⁴

¹Bioengineering, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States; ²Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States; ³Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States; ⁴Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI), a new technique that images distributions of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles by exploiting their nonlinear magnetization, can achieve high positive-contrast and quantitative clinical cell tracking, angiography, and inflammation imaging. Here, we present the first experimental demonstration of stem cell tracking with MPI. We show experimentally that MPI signal has excellent positive contrast, is highly linear with cell number, and is not depth-attenuated or diffused in tissue, in contrast to optical techniques. The detection sensitivity for MPI stem cell imaging is currently 10K cells, with potential for improvement by more than 2 orders of magnitude.