Automatic segmentation of abdominal adipose tissue in MRI

This paper presents a method for automatically segmenting abdominal adipose tissue from 3-dimensional magnetic resonance images. We distinguish between three types of adipose tissue; visceral, deep subcutaneous and superficial subcutaneous. Images are pre-processed to remove the bias field effect of intensity in-homogeneities. This effect is estimated by a thin plate spline extended to fit two classes of automatically sampled intensity points in 3D. Adipose tissue pixels are labelled with fuzzy c-means clustering and locally determined thresholds. The visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue are separated using deformable models, incorporating information from the clustering. The subcutaneous adipose tissue is subdivided into a deep and superficial part by means of dynamic programming applied to a spatial transformation of the image data. Regression analysis shows good correspondences between our results and total abdominal adipose tissue percentages assessed by dual-emission X-ray absorptiometry (R ² = 0.86).