Evaluating Anterior Cruciate Ligament Risk of Injury Using a Graph Convolutional Autoencoder

Athanasios Babouras, Paul A. Martineau, Thomas Fevens

Current solutions for assessing the risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury typically rely on expensive motion-capture labs that require substantial resource investment or subjective evaluations of specific athletic stress tests by experts. The Drop Vertical Jump (DVJ) and the Single Leg Hop (SLH) are two examples of such tests typically used to track progress in ACL rehabilitation. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised learning model that runs entirely on a smartphone for two tasks, based on an autoencoder architecture with multiple layers of graph convolutional networks, which utilizes pose estimation data to determine a person's injury risk status. Our model accurately predicts athletes at high risk of injury for both athletic stress tests, with average sensitivities and specificities of 78% and 78% for the DVJ, and 75% and 74% for the SLH. Our findings support the development of a widely accessible smartphone solution for real-time screening of ACL injury risk.