Moving Beyond CT Body Composition Analysis

Objectives Deep learning for body composition analysis (BCA) is gaining traction in clinical research, offering rapid and automated ways to measure body features like muscle or fat volume. However, most current methods prioritize computed tomography (CT) over magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This study presents a deep learning approach for automatic BCA using MR T2-weighted sequences. Methods Initial BCA segmentations (10 body regions and 4 body parts) were generated by mapping CT segmentations from body and organ analysis (BOA) model to synthetic MR images created using an in-house trained CycleGAN. In total, 30 synthetic data pairs were used to train an initial nnU-Net V2 in 3D, and this preliminary model was then applied to segment 120 real T2-weighted MRI sequences from 120 patients (46% female) with a median age of 56 (interquartile range, 17.75), generating early segmentation proposals. These proposals were refined by human annotators, and nnU-Net V2 2D and 3D models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation on this optimized dataset of real MR images. Performance was evaluated using Sørensen-Dice, Surface Dice, and Hausdorff Distance metrics including 95% confidence intervals for cross-validation and ensemble models. Results The 3D ensemble segmentation model achieved the highest Dice scores for the body region classes: bone 0.926 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.914–0.937), muscle 0.968 (95% CI, 0.961–0.975), subcutaneous fat 0.98 (95% CI, 0.971–0.986), nervous system 0.973 (95% CI, 0.965–0.98), thoracic cavity 0.978 (95% CI, 0.969–0.984), abdominal cavity 0.989 (95% CI, 0.986–0.991), mediastinum 0.92 (95% CI, 0.901–0.936), pericardium 0.945 (95% CI, 0.924–0.96), brain 0.966 (95% CI, 0.927–0.989), and glands 0.905 (95% CI, 0.886–0.921). Furthermore, body part 2D ensemble model reached the highest Dice scores for all labels: arms 0.952 (95% CI, 0.937–0.965), head + neck 0.965 (95% CI, 0.953–0.976), legs 0.978 (95% CI, 0.968–0.988), and torso 0.99 (95% CI, 0.988–0.991). The overall average Dice across body parts (2D = 0.971, 3D = 0.969, P = ns) and body regions (2D = 0.935, 3D = 0.955, P < 0.001) ensemble models indicates stable performance across all classes. Conclusions The presented approach facilitates efficient and automated extraction of BCA parameters from T2-weighted MRI sequences, providing precise and detailed body composition information across various regions and body parts.