Computational methods for pericardial fat evaluation

This work presents image processing methods for the quantitative analysis of pericardial fat by using cardiac CT imaging. Although pericardial fat has recently been shown to correlate with cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular risk factors and metabolic syndrome, many concerns still remain about the methods for measuring pericardial fat, its regional distribution on the myocardium and the accuracy and reproducibility of the evaluations. This paper addresses these issues, proposing a method for the analysis of single-frame 3D images obtained by the standard acquisition protocol used in coronary calcium scoring. Experimental results show that the method produces evaluations in good agreement with those obtained by manual segmentation. Thus, the introduced method may be used for the systematic evaluation of pericardial fat, that may be useful for risk stratification of patients undergoing cardiac CT.