Fast and accurate ultrasonography for visceral fat measurement

Abstract

Visceral fat area (VFA) has close relationship with hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and therefore serve as a reliable indicator of these diseases. Abdominal computed tomography (CT) enables precise quantification of the VFA and has been considered as the gold standard for VFA assessment. In this paper, we develope a novel method to quickly and accurately measure the VFA with ultrasonography (US). We evaluated the novel method on five volunteers and the diagnosis procedures lasted less than 30 seconds averagely. The simulation results by our method were compared with VFA estimated by abdominal CT. The correlation coefficient between them was 0.913 for men and 0.858 for women. And the mean deviation of between VFA by CT and by our method was 19.8cm2 for men and 13.3cm2 for women. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.