Fluxgate Magnetometer and Performance for Measuring Iron Compounds

摘要

It has been observed that patients with some neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer, Parkinson etc.) accumulate metals in their nervous system, in particular the area of interest is the basal ganglia region. Several solutions can be considered such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and SQUID magnetometers. It should be noted that the first approach works without radioactive tracers, however in presence of patients with implanted devices the MRI cannot be used. The PET is an invasive technique which requires use of radioactive tracers and the SQUID is a solution that can be pursued but it is expensive and it is a sophisticated method of measurement with a complex set-up and it is an expensive cryogenic instrumentation. In this paper, the possibility to use the Flexible RTD-Fluxgate magnetometer as alternative low cost solution, able to detect weak magnetic fields or field perturbations with low dimensions, high sensitivity, low power consumption and an intrinsic digital form of the output signal as respect the classical second harmonic fluxgate, will be addressed. Experimental results are shown that encourage to pursue this approach in order to obtain simple devices that can measure several quantities of known ferromagnetic compounds accumulated in a localized area in order to be used as diagnosis method.