Heterogeneous distribution of hepatic and pancreatic fat fraction in overweight or obese children and adolescents

The ectopic fat is not evenly distributed in organs and can be a time dependent process that starts at early age. In this work, we focused on obese or overweight children and adolescents and calculated the voxel-wised liver and pancreas fat fraction. With our recently proposed deep learning method, we separately quantified the fat depositions in different compartments of liver and pancreas with high precisions. Our analysis revealed an unevenly distributed ectopic fat in both liver and pancreas at young age and suggested that hepatic and pancreatic fat depositions are weakly coupled but have different underlying mechanisms.