Journal: Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.)

Article Title: Tissue sodium content is elevated in the skin and subcutaneous adipose tissue in women with lipedema

doi: 10.1002/oby.22090

Figure Lengend Snippet: Anatomical images used for segmentation of regions of interest and analysis of fat tissue content. a–b) Example fat-weighted (Dixon FAT ) and water-weighted (Dixon WATER ) images. c) ROIs were segmented manually from the Dixon WATER image, including the skin and total muscle; the subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) region was defined as the area between the inner border of the skin and the outer border of the muscle. The bone and large blood vessels were removed from all ROIs. d–e) Colored masks represent the voxels containing fat or water defined above or below a threshold of the Dixon FAT image. f) A histogram of the Dixon FAT image shows two distinct compartments; a k-means clustering algorithm was used to set a threshold between higher and lower signal intensity compartments corresponding to fat and water tissue, respectively. The fat/water volume ratio was calculated as a ratio of the number of voxels within each tissue.

Article Snippet: A threshold was applied to the central Dixon FAT images based on a k-means clustering algorithm ( kmeans function in MATLAB R2015a, MathWorks, Natick MA) assuming two compartments: fat and water.

Techniques:

Journal: Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.)

Article Title: Tissue sodium content is elevated in the skin and subcutaneous adipose tissue in women with lipedema

doi: 10.1002/oby.22090

Figure Lengend Snippet: The Dixon FAT image (top row) and corresponding map of tissue sodium content (bottom row) in patients with lipedema adjacent to matched female controls. a) A patient with Stage 1 lipedema is 37 years old and has a BMI of 21.3 kg/m 2 . She is similar in age, race, and BMI to the female control (b) who is 33 years old with a BMI of 23.8 kg/m 2 . Structural measures of calf circumference and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) area are also similar (lipedema vs. control values, calf circumference 36.8 vs. 37.2 cm, normalized SAT area 5.7 vs. 5.4 mm). However, the tissue sodium content is higher in the skin (14.4 vs. 9.1 mmol/L, arrow), SAT (14.1 vs. 9.2 mmol/L, arrowhead) and muscle (17.9 vs. 13.6 mmol/L, circle). The fat/water volume ratio in the calf is also greater (0.47 vs. 0.35 ratio). c–d) A patient with Stage 4 lipedema is 55 years old and has a BMI of 37.2 kg/m 2 . She is similar in age, race, and BMI to the female control who is 49 years old with a BMI of 36.4 kg/m 2 . Structural measures of calf circumference and SAT area are also similar (lipedema vs. control values, calf circumference 41.0 vs. 41.6 cm, normalized SAT area 11.2 vs. 11.8 mm). The tissue sodium content is higher in the patient with lipedema in all regions, including skin (15.7 vs. 12.6 mmol/L, arrow), SAT (13.3 vs. 8.2 mmol/L, arrowhead), and muscle (19.8 vs. 14.3 mmol/L, circle). The fat/water volume ratio in the calf is also higher (0.95 vs. 0.87 ratio) in the patient with lipedema compared to the matched female control.

Article Snippet: A threshold was applied to the central Dixon FAT images based on a k-means clustering algorithm ( kmeans function in MATLAB R2015a, MathWorks, Natick MA) assuming two compartments: fat and water.

Techniques: Control