title: Comparison of visceral adipose tissue quantification on water suppressed and nonwater-suppressed MRI at 3.0 Tesla.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To systematically evaluate and compare the performance of water-saturated and nonwater-saturated T1-weighted 3.0 T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the application of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) quantification.
  
  
  METHODS
  Forty-five patients underwent abdomen MRI using two different sequences at 3.0 T: 1) a traditional T1-weighted gradient echo sequence, and 2) the same sequence with water presaturation to enhance fat and nonfat contrast. VAT amounts from both water-saturated and nonwater-saturated images were quantified with a manual thresholding technique and an automated segmentation method to study quantification variability and consistency of the two imaging techniques.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Nonwater-saturated MRI had significantly larger coefficient of variation than water-saturated MRI in the imaging reproducibility study based on 112 slices from seven subjects (11.4% vs. 2.5%, P < 0.0001). VAT volumes measured from the nonwater-saturation MRI sequence had significantly higher variability than those from water-saturation images even when using a manual quantification method based on images from 38 subjects (1.76% vs. 1.08%, P < 0.001). In addition, the VAT volume amounts from nonwater-saturation images and water-saturated images quantified with the automatic and manual quantification methods were statistically consistent.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Water-saturated MRI sequences at 3.0 T for VAT quantification improve reproducibility and decrease variability compared with nonwater saturated sequences, especially with the use of automatic quantification methods.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Anqi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Horacio
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Murillo
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cusi
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Peng
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001834:Body Water; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D050152:Intra-Abdominal Fat / Q000473:pathology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique