SummaryWe will develop “MRI Body Charts” for whole-body Dixon MRI in the NAKO: standardized reference ranges (centiles) for volumes of major abdominal organs, vessels, muscle, and fat compartments across adulthood. Although automated segmentation now enables fast extraction of these measurements at population scale, their use for interpreting individual scans is limited by the lack of representative reference ranges that account for normal variation with age, sex, and body size. Using validated automated image analysis, rigorous quality control, and flexible normative modeling (GAMLSS), we will quantify typical variation and derive individualized centile scores that indicate how typical or atypical a person’s organ volumes are compared with peers. We will examine different strategies for body-size adjustment (allometric scaling) to ensure that clinically meaningful deviations are not masked. To assess clinical relevance, we will relate deviation patterns to established health domains (systemic, metabolic, and vascular), include white matter hyperintensity burden from brain MRI as a marker of vascular brain injury, and compare deviation profiles across common chronic disease diagnoses. Expected public-health impact is improved, standardized interpretation of whole-body MRI findings and a reusable reference framework that supports population research and, in the longer term, earlier detection and monitoring of multisystem disease-related changes. We will make the resulting reference models and scoring tools available to the NAKO research community.

Keywords normative whole-body-mri

InstitutionsTUM Klinikum