Purpose or Case Report: Quantify the amount of fat in the different muscles to look for a pattern of degeneration in Duchenne's dystrophy.
Methods & Materials:
Ten patients with Duchenne distrophy and eight healthy volunteers were examined as follows: all subjects were scanned while in the supine position with thighs relaxed and parallel to the magnet magnetic field direction. Images were acquired on a 3T MRI Scanner. The regions of interest (ROI) were drawn on each patient's thigh muscles. Eleven ROIs in the thigh were chosen, one for each muscle: lateral vast, intermediate vast, rectus femoris, medial vast, Sartori, long adduct, graceful, magnum adduct, semimembranous, semitendinous and biceps femoris.

Results: By applying the 2-point Dixon method, for quantification of fat with images in phase and out of phase, exploiting the fact of the precession difference of hydrogen protons from water and fat. It was observed that the method is very useful to be able to quantify the fat of the muscles, and to be able to track the progression of muscle degeneration
Conclusions: The magnetic resonance imaging technique is non-invasive, compared to the biopsy that is currently performed to diagnose muscular dystrophy. In this work, the average fat percentage of each thigh of each patient with a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy has been compared. This has been achieved thanks to the different response of hydrogen nuclei found in fat, compared to hydrogen nuclei found in water molecules, when they are excited with selective pulse sequences that allow magnifying the difference. between both tissues. Two different softwares have been used to measure the percentage of fat associated with each muscle, and it is observed that they are very similar, although it can be emphasized that ImageJ is more accurate, since the desired region of interest can be measured, that is to say You can select the entire muscle region, therefore, the Dixon 2-point method is reliable for fat quantification.