Highly Flexible and Modular Simulation Framework for Magnetic Particle Imaging

Abstract: Simulations with high accuracy are an essential part of scientific research to accelerate the innovation process. They are especially useful for finding novel approaches or optimizing existing methods. Today, powerful software tools are available consisting of multiple packages with a wide variety of features, methods, and models meet the requirements for different questions in multiple fields of research. Unfortunately, the complexity and often inflexibility of such unspecific software tools can hinder an optimal workflow. Especially in the case of a novel research fields, e.g., Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI), the requirements on a software tool are a high degree of flexibility paired with a manageable number of highly specific features to provide fast and easy access. Thus, often research sites generates their own software solution to address their specific demands. Until now, only few simulation frameworks are available, which partially fulfil most requirements of the young field of MPI. However, the coverage of the entire process of emulating a full MPI experiment from magnetic field and particle dynamic simulations, hardware and sequence programming over signal generation and data processing to final reconstruction and visualization combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) and without the need of complex combination of different software packages cannot be found in the literature or MPI community so far. With the presented modular simulation framework consisting of multiple interconnected software packages to specific purposes, all necessary simulation steps are provided. The high degree of flexibility and modularity allow the simulation and emulation of almost any kind of MPI scanners known in the MPI community. Furthermore, the modular framework allows an easy connection of third-party software using dedicated interfaces between important steps.