Rapid, Volumetric Segmentation of Visceral Adipose Tissue with Quantitative Chemical Shift MRI at 3T

Aziz H. Poonawalla¹, Brett P. Sjoberg¹, Michael Schroeder¹, Diego Hernando¹, Pablo Irarrazaval^1,2, Scott Brian Reeder¹

Quantitative measurement of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) is demonstrated using a volumetric chemical-shift fat/water imaging method with corrections for relaxation effects and accurate spectral modeling of fat. Fat, water and quantitative fat-fraction images were acquired over the entire abdomen and pelvis at 3T with a 32-channel phased array in a single 26-sec breath-hold. Robust VAT volumes were measured semi-automatically with <30 min post-processing, with strong correlation (r2 = 0.99) to manually-segmented VAT requiring ~4 hours.