Jessica Ornowski, Lucas Dziesinski, Madeline Hess, Roland Krug, Maryse Fortin, Abel Torres-Espin, Sharmila Majumdar, Valentina Pedoia, Noah B Bonnheim, Jeannie F Bailey
BACKGROUND: Paraspinal muscle fat infiltration is associated with spinal degeneration and low back pain, however, quantifying muscle fat using clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques continues to be a challenge. Advanced MRI techniques, including chemical-shift encoding (CSE) based water-fat MRI, enable accurate measurement of muscle fat, but such techniques are not widely available in routine clinical practice. METHODS: To facilitate assessment of paraspinal muscle fat using clinical imaging, we compared four thresholding approaches for estimating muscle fat fraction (FF) using T1- and T2-weighted images, with measurements from water-fat MRI as the ground truth: Gaussian thresholding, Otsu's method, K-mean clustering, and quadratic discriminant analysis...
March 2024: JOR Spine