Adherence to thresholds: overdiagnosis of left ventricular noncompaction cardiomyopathy

Thresholds derived from quantification in imaging are increasingly used to define disease. This derivation is not an exact science. When one uses a threshold to define a disease, one does not clearly demarcate disease from normality because the threshold includes overlapping spectra of mild disease and normality. Thus, use of the threshold will mislabel normal individuals with disease. In this perspective, we will describe how the threshold has been derived for left ventricular noncompaction cardiomyopathy, the statistical biases in the design of studies used to derive the threshold, and the dangers of overdiagnosis when the threshold is used to rule out left ventricular noncompaction cardiomyopathy.