NEURAL ACTIVITY PROFILES ASSOCIATED WITH ACL INJURY-RISK MECHANICS IN ECOLOGICAL SPORT SPECIFIC VIRTUAL REALITY

BACKGROUND: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is secondary to a multifactorial etiology encompassing anatomical, biological, mechanical, and neurological factors. The nature of the injury being primarily due to non-contact mechanics further implicates neural control as a key injury-risk factor, though it has received considerably less study. PURPOSE: To determine the contribution of neural activity to injury-risk mechanics in ecological sport-specific VR landing scenarios. METHODS: Ten female high-school soccer players (15.5±0.85 years; 165.0±6.09 cm; 59.1±11.84 kg) completed a neuroimaging session to capture neural activity during a bilateral leg press and a 3D biomechanics session performing a header within a VR soccer scenario. The bilateral leg press involved four 30 s blocks of repeated bilateral leg presses paced to a metronome beat of 1.2 Hz with 30 s rest between blocks. The VR soccer scenario simulated a corner-kick, requiring the participant to jump and head a virtual soccer ball into a virtual goal (Figure 1A-E). Initial contact and peak knee flexion and abduction angles were extracted during the landing from the header as injury-risk variables of interest and were correlated with neural activity. RESULTS: Evidenced in Table 1 and Figure 1 (bottom row), increased initial contact abduction, increased peak abduction, and decreased peak flexion were associated with increased sensory, visual-spatial, and cerebellar activity (r(2)= 0.42-0.57, p (corrected) < .05, z (max) > 3.1, table & figure 1). Decreased initial contact flexion was associated with increased frontal cortex activity (r(2)= 0.68, p (corrected) < .05, z (max) > 3.1). CONCLUSION: Reduced neural efficiency (increased activation) of key regions that integrate proprioceptive, visual-spatial, and neurocognitive activity for motor control may influence injury-risk mechanics in sport. The regions found to increase in activity in relation to higher injury-risk mechanics are typically activated to assist with spatial navigation, environmental interaction, and precise motor control. The requirement for athletes to increase their activity for more basic knee motor control may result in fewer neural resources available to maintain knee joint alignment, allocate environmental attention, and handle increased motor coordination demands. These data indicate that strategies to enhance efficiency of visual-spatial and cognitive-motor control during high demand sporting activities is warranted to improve ACL injury-risk reduction.