Classification of Abdominal Visceral and Subcutaneous Fat Distributions
by Body Shape Descriptors
Abstract
This study aims to explore new categorization that characterizes the
distribution clusters of visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissues (VAT
and SAT) measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); to analyze the
relationship between the VAT-SAT distribution patterns and the novel
body shape descriptors (BSDs); and to develop a classifier to predict
the fat distribution clusters using the BSDs. 66 male and 54 female
participants were scanned by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a
stereovision body imaging (SBI) to measure participants’ abdominal VAT
and SAT volumes and the BSDs. A fuzzy c-means algorithm was used
to form the inherent grouping clusters of abdominal fat distributions. A
support-vector-machine (SVM) classifier, with an embedded feature
selection scheme, was employed to determine an optimal subset of the
BSDs for predicting internal fat distributions. A five-fold
cross-validation procedure was used to prevent over-fitting in the
classification. The classification results of the BSDs were compared
with those of the traditional anthropometric measurements and the Dual
Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry (DXA) measurements. Four clusters
were identified for abdominal fat distributions: low VAT and SAT,
elevated VAT and SAT, higher SAT, and higher VAT. The cross-validation
accuracies of the traditional anthropometric, DXA and BSD measurements
are 85.0%, 87.5% and 90%, respectively.