Fig. 1

Measurement of deep and superficial subcutaneous adipose tissue area by cross-sectional abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans. The fascia superficialis (arrowhead) was used to separate superficial and deep compartments from SAT (a). The measurement of adipose tissue area was performed by tracing the fascia superficialis in the transverse CT image. After drawing the region of interest (ROI), the pixels with a threshold range of −190 to −30 Hounsfield units (HU) were identified as each adipose tissue area (b, c) as follows: red color superficial subcutaneous fat; blue deep subcutaneous fat; black visceral adipose tissue