Quantification of Epicardial and Thoracic Adipose Tissue using WOA Optimized CNN

Cardiac fat depots are associated with the heart diseases. Epicardial fat and thoracic fat plays the major role in the development of cardiovascular disease. The increased thickness of the epicardial and thoracic fat leads to several diseases such as metabolic syndrome, coronary atherosclerosis, etc. It is necessary to quantify the epicardial adipose tissue and thoracic adipose tissue. There are different imaging and assessing techniques for epicardial and thoracic adipose tissue quantification. These tissues can be quantified automatically or manually from the CT and MRI cardiac scans. The quantification of the epicardial fat and thoracic fat requires segmentation of these fats by various segmentation methods and then they are quantified. This project proposes the fully automatic segmentation and quantification of the epicardial and thoracic adipose tissues from the cardiac CT scan images using the krill herd optimization algorithm and fuzzy c-means segmentation algorithm. The whale optimization algorithm performs the feature selection process. The fuzzy cmeans algorithm is used for the segmentation process by means of clustering which segments the epicardial fat and paracardial adipose tissue(EAT &PAT) from the input image. The segmented epicardial and paracardial fat region are then used for the quantification process which provides the epicardial and thoracic fat volume. The thoracic fat is the combination of the epicardial and paracardial fat. This proposed system is implemented by using the MATLAB code. The proposed system is simple, fully automatic and produces accurate results.

Adult Epicardial Fat Exhibits Beige Features

Context: Human epicardial fat has been designated previously as brown-like fat. The supraclavicular fat depot in man has been defined as beige coexistent with classical brown based on its gene expression profile. Objective: The aim of the study was to establish the gene expression profile and morphology of human epicardial and visceral paracardial fat compared with sc fat. Setting: The study was conducted at a tertiary care hospital cardiac center. Patients: Epicardial, visceral paracardial, and sc fat samples had been taken from middle-aged patients with severe coronary atherosclerosis or valvular heart disease. Interventions: Gene expression was determined by reverse transcription- quantitative PCR and relative abundance of the mitochondrial uncoupling protein-1 (UCP-1) by Western blotting. Epicardial tissue sections from patients were examined by light microscopy, UCP-1 immunohistochemistry, and cell morphometry. Main Outcome Measures: We hypothesized that epicardial fat has a mixed phenotype with a gene expression profile similar to that described for beige cell lineage. Results: Immunoreactive UCP-1 was clearly measurable in each epicardial sample analyzed but was undetectable in each of the 4 other visceral and sc depots. Epicardial fat exhibited high expression of genes for UCP-1, PRDM16, PGC-1α, PPARγ, and the beige adipocyte-specific marker CD137, which were also expressed in visceral paracardial fat but only weakly in sternal, upper abdominal, and lower extremity sc fat. Histology of epicardial fat showed small unilocular adipocytes without UCP-1 immunostaining. Conclusion: UCP-1 is relatively abundant in epicardial fat, and this depot possesses molecular features characteristic of those found in vitro in beige lineage adipocytes.