Relationship Between Body Fat Percentage and Near-Infrared Scattering Images of Muscle: A Noninvasive and Rapid Study...

Assessing body fat percentage is important for human health management and disease prevention, but a rapid, accurate, inexpensive, and safe measurement method is needed. In this paper, we described the research to evaluate the body fat percentage from the near-infrared scattering images of muscle. The correlation between the subcutaneous fat thickness measured experimentally with the skinfold caliper and the evaluation parameters obtained from the scattering image was examined at six sites, and the measurement sites that could be used for the evaluation of body fat percentage were selected. The selected sites were femoral site, lower leg, and brachium, and there were four evaluation parameters. The body fat percentage was evaluated from the sum of the four evaluation parameters, classified by parameter, obtained from the scattering images measured for these three sites. The results of the experiment show that body fat percentage can be evaluated from near-infrared scattering images of muscle.