Fig. 2

Image processing workflow. a Segmentation based on a crude manual outline of the adipose tissue in the neck region. b Segmentation based on thresholding of the fat fraction volume selecting all voxels with a fat fraction between 400 and 1000 per mille. c Intersection of segmentations a and b leading to an exact representation of the adipose tissue in the neck region. d This segmentation was shrunk by one voxel in each dimension in order to reduce partial volume effects. e To reduce background noise the in-phase volume was thresholded in order to select the contours of the body and intersected with segmentation d resulting in a final segmentation f (overlay with PET data). This segmentation was again intersected with areas within the PET data volume exhibiting SUV values above 1.5 g/ml yielding a representation of the metabolically active supraclavicular adipose tissue