Image 1_Biomechanical and movement-quality predictors of lower-limb load-related injury in collegiate athletes: a prospective cohort study using functional movement screening, wearable inertial sensing, and explainable machine learning.tif

This prospective cohort study followed 161 collegiate athletes for one competitive season, integrating Functional Movement Screen task-level scores with wearable inertial measurement unit-derived features — including peak tibial acceleration asymmetry, surrogate vertical loading rate, and pelvis–trunk stability indices — within an explainable machine learning framework.

Four classifiers were compared across FMS-only, wearable-only, and fused configurations under nested five-fold cross-validation with embedded LASSO feature selection. Thirty-seven load-related time-loss injuries were recorded (23.0% incidence). The fused XGBoost model achieved an out-of-fold AUC of 0.70 (95% CI: 0.61–0.79), outperforming FMS-only (AUC 0.62) and wearable-only (AUC 0.64) configurations by statistically significant margins.