Clinical Assessment of Drop-Jump Landing for Determination of Risk for Knee Injury

Context: Clinical assessment tools are needed to identify individual athletes who possess elevated risk for anterior cruciate ligament injury. Existing methods require expensive equipment and the investment of a large amount of time for data processing, which makes them unfeasible for preparticipation screening of a large number of athletes. Objective: To assess the extent of agreement between LESS and the iLESS classifications of jump landing performance and the level of agreement between ratings assigned by a novice evaluator and an expert evaluator. Methods: Ratings of drop-jump landings from 20 video recordings of NCAA Division I collegiate athletes, which were randomly selected from a large database. Results: The dichotomous iLESS score corresponded to the dichotomous classification of LESS score for 15 of 20 cases rated by the expert evaluator and 17 of 20 cases rated by the novice evaluator. For the iLESS, only 2 scores out of 20 differed between the evaluators. Conclusions: A high level of agreement was observed between the LESS and iLESS methods for classification of jump landing performance. Because the iLESS method is inexpensive and efficient, it may prove to be valuable for preparticipation assessment of knee injury risk.