Article TypeCardiovascular Images

Advances in 3-dimensional (3D) echocardiography offer a rapid, effective imaging technique with adequate tem-poral and spatial resolution for left ventricular motion assess-ment. 3D multidirectional tracking of the endocardial left ventricular layer has shown that the functional pattern of direc-tional strain arrangement during cardiac contraction closely relates with the structural architecture of the myocardial heli-cal muscle fiber orientation.1 In a similar manner, we carried out segmentation tracking of the endocardial-epicardial lay-ers in 10 healthy young athletes (nonprofessional athletes, enrolled at the Sport Medicine Center of the University of Florence, Italy, training 2–3 days a week for 2 hours daily; all exhibiting an excellent echographic window) to evaluate the 3D strain pattern over the whole myocardium thickness and to compare with the hypothesized underlying fiber architec-ture. An echocardiographic 3D full-volume image of the lef