Simultaneous suppression of disturbing fields and localization of magnetic markers by means of multipole expansion

BACKGROUND: Magnetically marked capsules serve for the analysis of peristalsis and throughput times within the intestinal tract. Moreover, they can be used for the targeted disposal of drugs. The capsules get localized in time by field measurements with a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer array. Here it is important to ensure an online localization with high speed and high suppression of disturbing fields. In this article we use multipole expansions for the simultaneous localization and suppression of disturbing fields. METHODS: We expand the measurement data in terms of inner and outer multipoles. Thereby we obtain directly a separation of marker field and outer disturbing fields. From the inner dipoles and quadrupoles we compute the magnetization and position of the capsule. The outer multipoles get eliminated. RESULTS: The localization goodness has been analyzed depending on the order of the multipoles used and depending on the systems noise level. We found upper limits of the noise level for the usage of certain multipole moments. Given a signal to noise ratio of 40 and utilizing inner dipoles and quadrupoles and outer dipoles, the method enables an accuracy of 5 mm with a speed of 10 localizations per second. CONCLUSION: The multipole localization is an effective method and is capable of online-tracking magnetic markers.