Dimitrios
C. Karampinos1, Lorenzo Nardo1, Julio Carballido-Gamio1,
Ann Shimakawa2, Benjamin C. Ma3, Thomas M. Link1,
Roland Krug1
1Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Global Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 3Department of Orthopedic Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
The evaluation of shoulder muscle fat infiltration is important for the clinical management of patients with rotator cuff injuries. Goutalliers classification of T1-weighted or proton-density weighted images has been traditionally used to evaluate fat infiltration in the shoulder muscles. However, this technique is semi-quantitative and therefore subjective and cannot track small fat infiltration changes. Chemical shift-based water/fat separation techniques have been recently implemented to measure fat content in skeletal muscle. In the present work, a chemical shift-based water fat separation is applied to the shoulder musculature of 31 subjects and the derived mean fat fraction quantitative measures are compared with Goutalliers classification.