Determination of fat and water contents in human from “SAT”-MRI sequences using automatic image segmentation

We propose a fully automatic method to quantify the relative part of muscle, subcutaneous, inter and intra-muscular fat in the human thigh from MR images. Our process is based on specific thresholding methods coupled with automatic detection and removal of non muscular and non fat elements, followed by a fusion of two MRI sequences: a reference sequence and a fat saturation one. This process is able to separate sedentary from Cushing´s disease affected subjects. It can also discriminate among sportsmen, long-distance runners from sprinters