Medical Imaging for Muscle Health

Ben presented this presentation as a summary of his work during his PhD program. He discussed the problem of relying on muscle mass in diagnosing muscle wasting. Decreasing muscle mass happens after decreasing strength. The infiltration of fat into muscle, or myosteatosis, is one metric of defining muscle quality, which can serve as a better indicator of muscle health instead of mass. In this body of work, Ben shows that muscle quality out performs muscle mass when predicting muscle strength. Ben also focuses on why this research matters- the deterioration of muscle health usually indicates deteriorating health. This played out with Ben’s grandma, and is occurring currently for countless others. Better ways of assessing muscle health can have impacts on everyone’s health now and in the future.