Bryan T. Addeman1, Abraam S. Soliman2, 3, Curtis N. Wiens4, Charles A. McKenzie1, 4
1Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; 2The Robarts Research Institute, London, ON, Canada; 3Biomedical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
Escalating interest in the studies of obesity and metabolic disease has created a demand for techniques to measure the regional distribution of adipose tissue. Current standards employ manual segmentation of fat on a single slice, and extrapolation to estimate total fat volumes. We propose a novel automated tissue segmentation technique on images acquired from the entire intra-abdominal cavity within a single breath-hold. Volunteers were imaged in less than 10 minutes, and the images were analyzed in under 2 minutes. Results are similar to those obtained by manual segmentation, but require no manual intervention and are calculated very rapidly.