Artificial intelligence and abdominal adipose tissue analysis: a literature review

Body composition imaging relies on assessment of tissues composition and distribution. Quantitative data provided by body composition imaging analysis have been linked to pathogenesis, risk, and clinical outcomes of a wide spectrum of diseases, including cardiovascular and oncologic. Manual segmentation of imaging data allows to obtain information on abdominal adipose tissue; however, this procedure can be cumbersome and time-consuming. On the other hand, quantitative imaging analysis based on artificial intelligence (AI) has been proposed as a fast and reliable automatic technique for segmentation of abdominal adipose tissue compartments, possibly improving the current standard of care. AI holds the potential to extract quantitative data from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images, which in most of the cases are acquired for other purposes. This information is of great importance for physicians dealing with a wide spectrum of diseases, including cardiovascular and oncologic, for the assessment of risk, pathogenesis, clinical outcomes, response to treatments, and complications. In this review we summarize the available evidence on AI algorithms aimed to the segmentation of visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue compartments on CT and MR images.