Analysis of Abdominal Fat Tissue Images Acquired with Continuously Moving Table MRI

Stathis Hadjidemetriou¹, Juergen Hennig¹, Florian Klausmann¹, Ute Ludwig¹

The risk for hypertension and diabetes is correlated closely to the amount of visceral fat. In this work, the abdominal fat is imaged with a continuously moving table whole body MRI technique. A method is presented for the repeatable, general, and reliable differentiation of lipids into subcutaneous and visceral. The data is restored for intensity uniformity. The corrected image is processed to segment the body region with the graph cuts algorithm operating on level sets. Then, the contour separating the subcutaneous and visceral fat regions is identified with a combination of the random walks algorithm and graph cuts.