Characterization of movement patterns using unsupervised learning neural networks: Exploring a novel approach for monitoring athletes during sidestepping

The monitoring of athletes is crucial to preventing injuries, identifying fatigue or supporting return-to-play decisions. The purpose of this study was to explore the ability of Kohonen neural network self-organizing maps (SOM) to objectively characterize movement patterns during sidestepping and their association with injury risk. Further, the network's sensitivity to detect limb dominance was assessed. The data of 67 athletes with a total of 613 trials were included in this study. The 3D trajectories of 28 lower-body passive markers collected during sidestepping were used to train a SOM. The network consisted of 1247 neurons distributed over a 43 x 29 rectangular map with a hexagonal neighbourhood topology. Out of 61,913 input vectors, the SOM identified 1247 unique body postures. Visualizing the movement trajectories and adding several hidden variables allows for the investigation of different movement patterns and their association with joint loading. The used approach identified athletes that show significantly different movement strategies when sidestepping with their dominant or non-dominant leg, where one strategy was clearly associated with ACL-injury-relevant risk factors. The results highlight the ability of unsupervised machine learning to monitor an individual athlete's status without the necessity to reduce the complexity of the data describing the movement.