Quantification of mass fat fraction in fish using water–fat separation MRI

Selection of fish with appropriate fat content and anatomic distribution is searched in fish industry. This necessitates fast and accurate measurements of mass fat fraction maps on a large number of fish. The objective of this work is to assess the relevance of MRI water–fat separation for this purpose. For the separation of the water and fat images we rely on a single T2⁎ and a multiple peak fat spectrum model, the parameters of which are estimated using the “Varpro” method. The difference of proton density between fat and water and the lack of the signal from the macromolecules are taken into account to convert the obtained proton density fat fraction into mass fat fraction. We used 0.23T NMR to validate the method on 30 salmon steaks. The fat fraction values were in the range of 5% to 25%. Very good accordance was found between 1.5T MRI and NMR although MRI slightly overestimated the mass fat fraction. The R2 of the linear regression was equal to 0.96 (P< 10− 5), the slope to 1.12 (CI.95 = 0.03). These results demonstrate that a good accuracy can be achieved. We also show that high throughput can be achieved since the measurements do not depend on the position and we conclude that, for example, it is feasible to quantify the mass fat fraction in fish steaks within about one minute per sample.