Muscle and fat quantification in MRI gradient echo images using a partial volume detection method. Application to the characterization of pig belly tissue

Complete dissection is the current reference method to quantify muscle and fat tissue on pig carcasses. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an appropriate nondestructive alternative method that can provide reliable and quantitative information on pig carcass composition without losing the spatial information. We have developed a method to quantify the amount of fat tissue and muscle in gradient echo MR images. This method is based on the method proposed by Shattuck et al. [12]. It provides segmentation of pure tissue and partial volume voxels, which allows separation of muscle and fat tissue including the fine insertions of intermuscular fat. Partial volume voxel signal is expected to be proportional to the signals of pure tissue constituting them or at least to vary monotonously with the proportion of each tissue. However, it is not always the case with gradient echo sequence due to the chemical shift effect. We studied this effect on a fat tissue/muscle interface model with variable proportion of water in the fat tissue and variable TE. We found that at TE=8 ms, for a 0.2-T MRI system, the requirement of Shattuck's method were filled thanks to the presence of water in fat tissue. Moreover, we extended the segmentation method with a simple correction scheme to compute more accurately the proportions of each tissue in partial volume voxels. We used this method to evaluate the fat tissue and muscle on 24 pig bellies using a gradient echo sequence (TR 700 ms, TE 8 ms, slice thickness 8 mm, number of averages 8, flip angle 90°, FOV 512 mm, matrix 512*512, Rect. FOV 4/8, 19 slices, space between slices 2 mm). The image analysis results were compared with dissection results giving a prediction error of the muscle content (mean=2.7 kg) of 88.9 g and of the fat content (mean=2.7 kg) of 115.8 g without correction of the chemical shift effect in the computation of partial volume fat content. The correction scheme improved these results to, respectively, 81.5 and 107.1 g.