Fast adipose tissue (FAT) assessment by MRI

We report a method of fast adipose tissue (FAT) assessment to characterize the quantity, and distribution of abdominal adipose tissue. Whole-volume coverage of the abdomen was obtained using 31 contiguous transverse T1-weighted images from 16 obese females. A radiologist manually traced all adipose tissue volumes in the images, while a physiologist used an automated method to measure adipose tissue in a single image at the level of the umbilicus. Automated analysis of the umbilicus-level image was significantly correlated with values obtained by manual analysis of the entire abdomen (p < 0.001). There was good agreement between the automated umbilicus-level image method and the manual whole abdomen method for subcutaneous adipose tissue (r2 = 0.958), visceral adipose tissue (r2 = 0.753), and total adipose tissue (r2 = 0.941). The automated method required 6 min vs 2 h for the manual method.