Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 2, 2026
05:07
Early Weight-Bearing Rehabilitation Protocol After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction
Published on: March 1, 2024
Quantifying Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury Resilience: A Screening and Composite Score Framework
Kirsten Seagers1, Krithika Swaminathan2, Julie Kolesar2
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine
|June 1, 2026
Summary
Identifying optimal screening for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries is crucial. Two activities, run cuts and single-leg drop jumps, accurately predict biomechanical risk factors, enabling an individualized ACL injury resilience (AIR) score.
Area of Science:
- Biomechanics
- Sports Medicine
- Orthopedics
Background:
- Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are common, with over 1.4 million occurring globally each year.
- While potentially preventable through screening and training, current movement assessments are time-consuming and lack consensus on optimal activities.
- Identifying modifiable biomechanical risk factors is key to developing effective prevention strategies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To identify an optimal set of activities that effectively capture an athlete's full-body, 3-dimensional biomechanical risk factors for ACL injury.
- To develop a framework for calculating an individual's ACL injury resilience (AIR) score based on these biomechanical factors.
Main Methods:
- A descriptive laboratory study involving adolescent female athletes (soccer, basketball, volleyball) with no prior injury history.
- Collected 3D motion capture and ground-reaction force data during five common ACL injury risk screening activities.
- Utilized column subset selection to identify the most predictive activities and developed the AIR score framework using biomechanical thresholds.
Main Results:
- Two activities—run cuts and single-leg drop jumps—accurately predicted biomechanical factors from the excluded activities (88.4% accuracy).
- The AIR score derived from these two activities showed strong agreement with a score calculated using all five activities (r=0.90, τ=0.72, P<.001).
- The AIR score effectively ranked participants' biomechanical resilience, with subscores for trunk, hip, knee, and foot.
Conclusions:
- The proposed AIR screen and score offer a robust framework for assessing ACL injury resilience, adaptable to future research.
- This individualized, objective 3D movement assessment identifies athletes with vulnerable movement patterns.
- The AIR score framework and its subscores can guide targeted exercise interventions for injury prevention.