The purpose of this study was to quantify the distribution of trabeculated (T) and compact (C) left ventricular (LV) myocardium masses in a healthy Caucasian population against age, gender and LV parameters, and to provide normal values for T, C and T/C.

One hundred and forty healthy subjects were prospectively recruited and underwent cardiac MRI at 1.5T with a stack of short-axis cine sequences covering the entire LV. End-diastolic volume (EDV), C and T masses were quantified using a semi-automatic method. Ejection fraction (EF) and T/C ratio were computed.

We included 70 men and 70 women with a mean age of 44±14 (SD) years (range: 20–69 years). The mean EF was 63.7±6.3 (SD) % (range: 50.7–82.0%), the mean EDV was 75.9±16.2 (SD) mL/m² (range: 36.4–112.2mL/m²), the mean C mass was 53.9±11.2 (SD) g/m² (range: 26.5–93.4g/m²) and the mean T mass was 4.9±2.4 (SD) g/m² (range: 1.1–11.4g/m²). The T/C ratio was 9.2±4.5% (range: 2.0–29.4%). Multivariate ANOVA test showed that the compact mass was influenced by EDV (P<0.0001), EF (P=0.001) and gender (P<0.0001), and the trabeculated mass depended on EDV (P<0.0001), gender (P=0.002) and age (P<0.0001), while the T/C ratio was only influenced by age (P=0.0003). Spearman test showed a correlation between EDV and C (r=0.60; P<0.0001),T (r=0.46; P<0.0001) and T/C ratio (r=0.26; P=0.0023).T and T/C ratio correlated with EF (r=−0.18, P=0.0373; r=−0.18, P=0.0321, respectively).

While the compact and trabeculated myocardium masses appear to relate separately to the cardiac function, age and gender, their ratio T/C appears to only decrease with age. Furthermore, we propose here normal values for T, C and T/C in a cohort of healthy Caucasians subjects.