Epicardial fat is associated with the development of metabolic syndrome and higher cardiovascular risk profile. Excessive fat can cause ventricular arrhythmias and alter repolarization. Fat is typically quantified with the Dixon technique, adding extra scan time. The microstructure of fat can also be differentiated with non-Gaussian diffusion weighting because the size of adipocytes differ from myocytes. Our automatic segmentation of the fat has 0.99 in accuracy and specificity compared with the Dixon technique. Further studies are required to associate myofibre misalignment with fat response in pathological hearts. Our technique can address both of these measures.
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