Editorial: Enhancing sports injury management through medical-engineering innovations

In terms of precise diagnosis and risk assessment, this special issue highlights pivotal progress from morphological judgment to quantitative prediction. Artificial intelligence models based on multimodal imaging and clinical data have significantly improved diagnostic accuracy and prognostic prediction. For instance, KneeXNet integrates graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with a multi-scale feature fusion module to enable automated, high-precision MRI diagnosis of knee injuries (Sun et Overall, the 24 research papers in this special issue cover a complete research chain, ranging from competitive sports injuries to age-related fragility fractures, from surgical techniques to rehabilitation protocols, and from fundamental mechanisms to clinical translation. They fully embody the interdisciplinary innovation philosophy of clinical demand-oriented, engineering technology-enabled, and functional recovery-targeted. These findings not only address numerous current clinical dilemmas but also lay a solid foundation for intelligent diagnosis, digital orthopedics, regenerative repair and smart rehabilitation. They also demonstrate that medical and engineering innovations will drive earlier, smarter, more precise, more efficient and personalized prevention and treatment in sports medicine. Moving forward, the diagnosis and management of sports injuries will continue to evolve toward full-process digitalization, normalized regenerative medicine, interpretable artificial intelligence, and integrated injury prevention and health maintenance.We hope readers can gain more than just technological progress, but also a clear perspective on how to solve practical clinical problems and foster broader interdisciplinary collaboration through this issue. Ultimately, we aim to enable all individuals affected by sports injuries-whether elite athletes or the general public-to truly benefit from these innovations, allowing them to exercise safely, recover efficiently, and return to their cherished lives with dignity. This embodies the original mission of sports medicine and fuels our ongoing research and endeavor.