Unsupervised assessment of subcutaneous and visceral fat by MRI

Abstract

This paper presents a method for unsupervised assessment of visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue in the abdominal region by MRI. The identification of the subcutaneous and the visceral regions were achieved by dynamic programming constrained by points acquired from an active shape model. The combination of active shape models and dynamic programming provides for a both robust and accurate segmentation. The method features a low number of parameters that give good results over a wide range of values.The unsupervised segmentation was compared with a manual procedure and the correlation between the manual segmentation and unsupervised segmentation was considered high. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.