In this paper we present an interactive tool that can be used to quantify fatinfiltration in lumbar muscles, which is useful in studying fat infiltrationand lower back pain (LBP) in adults. Currently, a qualitative assessment byvisual grading via a 5-point scale is used to study fat infiltration in lumbarmuscles from an axial view of lumbar-spine MR Images. However, a quantitativeapproach (on a continuous scale of 0-100\%) may provide a greater insight. Inthis paper, we propose a method to precisely quantify the fat deposition /infiltration in a user-defined region of the lumbar muscles, which may aidbetter diagnosis and analysis. The key steps are interactively segmenting theregion of interest (ROI) from the lumbar muscles using the well known livewiretechnique, identifying fatty regions in the segmented region based onvariable-selection of threshold and softness levels, automatically detectingthe center of the spinal column and fragmenting the lumbar muscles into smallerregions with reference to the center of the spinal column, computing keyparameters [such as total and region-wise fat content percentage, total-crosssectional area (TCSA) and functional cross-sectional area (FCSA)] and exportingthe computations and associated patient information from the MRI, into adatabase. A standalone application using MATLAB R2014a was developed to performthe required computations along with an intuitive graphical user interface(GUI).
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