General Methodology for Accurate MRI Abdominal Adipose Tissue Quantification

Anqi Zhou¹, Horacio Murillo¹, Qi Peng¹

Fast and accurate abdominal fat quantification has been more challenging on non-water-saturated (NWS) than on water-saturated (WS) MR images. We propose a general approach based on a combination of fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and signal intensity thresholding. The novel FCM algorithm utilizes the signal intensity of the neighboring voxels in addition to that of each voxel to eliminate full-volume water voxels from the original image. Statistically consistent results were obtained when the same algorithm was applied to both WS and NWS MR images. It is therefore a general approach to non-subjective, reproducible abdominal fat quantification on MR images.