Classification of obesity

Lean body mass

Biomedical engineering

Adipose tissue

Risk analysis (engineering)

Philosophy

Body adiposity index

Bone mineral

Quantitative assessment

Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry

Nuclear medicine

Composition (language)

Body weight

Body mass index

Linguistics

Internal medicine

Radiology

Pathology

Osteoporosis

Fat mass

Medicine

Journal of Investigative Medicine

This paper gives a brief overview of common non-invasive techniques for body composition analysis and a more in-depth review of a body composition assessment method based on fat-referenced quantitative MRI. Earlier published studies of this method are summarized, and a previously unpublished validation study, based on 4753 subjects from the UK Biobank imaging cohort, comparing the quantitative MRI method with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is presented. For whole-body measurements of adipose tissue (AT) or fat and lean tissue (LT), DXA and quantitative MRIs show excellent agreement with linear correlation of 0.99 and 0.97, and coefficient of variation (CV) of 4.5 and 4.6 per cent for fat (computed from AT) and LT, respectively, but the agreement was found significantly lower for visceral adipose tissue, with a CV of >20 per cent. The additional ability of MRI to also measure muscle volumes, muscle AT infiltration and ectopic fat, in combination with rapid scanning protocols and efficient image analysis tools, makes quantitative MRI a powerful tool for advanced body composition assessment.

Advanced Body Composition Assessment: From Body Mass Index to Body Composition Profiling