Assessment of Abdominal Adiposity and Organ Fat with Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract

Because of the well-known relationship between obesity and high incidence of diseases, fat related research using mice models is being widely investigated in preclini- cal experiments. In the present study, we developed a tech- nique to automatically measure mice abdominal adipose volume and determine the depot locations using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Our technique includes an in- novative method to detect fat tissues from MR images which not only utilizes the T1 weighted intensity informa- tion, but also takes advantage of the transverse relaxation time(T2) calculated from the multiple echo data. The tech- nique contains both a fat optimized MRI imaging acquisi- tion protocol that works well at 7T and a newly designed post processing methodology that can automatically ac- complish the fat extraction and depot recognition without user intervention in the segmentation procedure. The post processing methodology has been integrated into easy-to- use software that we have made available via free down- load. The method was validated by comparing automated results with two independent manual analyses in 26 mice exhibiting different fat ratios from the obesity research project. The comparison confirms a close agreement between the results in total adipose tissue size and voxel- by-voxel overlaps.