Assessment of right and left ventricular trabeculation in a reference collective: gender and age dependency of myocardial trabeculation

Left ventricular non-compaction (LVNC) cardiomyopathy is characterized by a thin, compacted epimyocardial and a thick non-compacted, trabeculated endomyocardial layer. High-resolution cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) has been successfully used to distinguish myocardial trabeculation within the LV cavity. Usually, a compact-to-non-compact ratio of 2.3 on MRI is regarded pathological. Unfortunately, this one-dimensional measure is not well standardized and observer-dependent. Moreover, only scarce data exists on age and gender dependency of myocardial trabeculation in normal volunteers