ZusammenfassungAging-related decline of muscle mass, quality and strength after the age of 50, called sarcopenia, causes high health care expenditures. This demands the development of appropriate tools for a better understanding of the aging process of muscle and to automatically differentiate the etiologies of sub-clinical muscular disorders. The German National Cohort (GNC) provides a comprehensive magnetic resonance (MR) data set with high statistical power for the assessment of normal variants and subclinical alterations of the human musculature. In this proposal, we aim to develop morphological and texture analysis methods for automatic segmentation and quantitative evaluation of musculature in the body trunk and thigh applicable to the MR images of the GNC. The quantified muscle parameters will be analyzed in correlation with age, gender, BMI and muscle strength to potentially identify muscle biomarkers.

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EinrichtungenUniversitätsklinikum Tübingen, Universität Stuttgart, Section on Experimental Radiology