Quantifying Abdominal Body Composition from CT Scans

Computed tomography (CT) scans of the abdomen were performed during each patient’s periodic check-up. Each patient was imaged in the supine position and the thickness of each slice was 1.0mm. Axial CT images were used for muscle and fat mass evaluations at the level of the third lumber spine [14 (link)]. The abdominal muscle area (AMA), abdominal subcutaneous fat area (ASFA), and abdominal visceral fat area (AVFA) were automatically measured using SYNAPSE VINCENT software (version 3.0, Fujifilm Medical, Tokyo, Japan), which enables the tissue segmentation using Hounsfield unit thresholds [15 (link)]. To avoid the potentially confounding influence of body size, we also adjusted AMA, ASFA, and AVFA by dividing by the height of each patient (AMA/height, ASFA/height, and AVFA/height, respectively) [16 (link)].