A comprehensive study on automated muscle segmentation for assessing fat infiltration in neuromuscular diseases

Severity and progression of degenerative neuromuscular diseases can be sensitively captured by evaluating the fat infiltration of muscle tissue in T1-weighted MRI scans of human limbs. For computing the fat fraction, the original muscle needs to be first separated from other tissue.Five conceptionally different approaches were investigated and evaluated with respect to the segmentation of muscles of human thighs. Besides a rather basic thresholding approach, local (level set) as well as global (graph cut) energy-minimizing segmentation approaches with and without a shape prior energy term were examined.
Source: Magnetic Resonance Imaging - Category: Radiology Authors: Source Type: research