Quantitative Scoring of Muscle Involvement in MRI of Neuromuscular Diseases

An automated method to evaluate the fat infiltration in tissues has been developed and applied to images of the human leg. The final aim is to obtain a quantitative evaluation of fat infiltration percentage and to relate it to the grade of muscle impairment in subjects affected by Neuro-Muscular Diseases (NMD). Through a muscle segmentation algorithm on structural T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (MRIs), the estimated non-muscle percentage (eNMP) in the segmented muscle area has been evaluated in healthy subjects as a reference value. A semi-automated procedure allows extending the algorithm to MRIs of NMD patients. A strong correlation has been demonstrated between the eNMP index and the disease severity