Assessment of Adipose Tissue from Whole Body 3T MRI Scans

Accurate assessment of total body and the distribution of regional adipose tissue is a critical problem emerging in the United States. Using manual segmentation of MRI scanned images is a problem due to the high variation between manual delineations. Manual segmentation also requires highly trained experts with knowledge of anatomy. In this study, we used a specific water saturation sequence and histogram based segmentation method that provides robust delineation results for adipose tissue from whole body MRI scans. Both phantom and human subject studies were performed. Compared with a standard clinical T1-weighted acquisition, our method appears to give superior quantitative results.