Improving conspicuity in MPI by equalization of the “broad tails” of the MPI point spread function

Abstract

The point spread function (PSF) in MPI has been found to be the derivative of the Langevin function. This PSF has noticeably longer “tails” than a single Gaussian. These tails of the PSF manifest as baseline blurring, which significantly decreases contrast and “glare” in MPI. Here, we develop a robust post-processing method to equalize (similar to deconvolution) the PSF, to essentially remove these tails. Fortunately we find this equalization method does not incur the enormous loss of SNR observed in conventional deconvolution.