Radiology in Rio: Evaluating medical imaging’s role at the 2016 Summer Olympics

With the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, holding its closing ceremony on Feb. 25, researchers are now sharing an investigation of imaging-depicted sports-related injuries that took place during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The group published its full findings in Radiology.

Overall, the authors found that 9.8 percent of athletes who participated in 2016 Summer Olympics experienced an injury.

“The Olympic Summer Games are considered the most important sporting event worldwide. Competing athletes are at the peak of their careers and have trained and practiced for years to be able to participate in the games at a high level,” lead author Ali Guermazi, MD, PhD, professor and vice chair in the department of radiology at Boston University School of Medicine and a musculoskeletal radiologist at Boston Medical Center, said in a prepared statement. “Unfortunately, these elite athletes are at risk for injury, and the medical teams onsite will do anything to ensure a fast return to competition or initiate the next appropriate measures in light of more severe injuries.”

Imaging professionals performed more than 1,000 radiologic exams during the 2016 Summer Olympics. More than 59 percent were MR exams, 30 percent were x-rays and more than 10 percent were ultrasound.

“The relevance of imaging is stressed by the fact that a large number of advanced imaging was requested, with MRI comprising nearly 60 percent of all imaging performed for diagnosis of sports-related injuries,” Guermazi said in the same statement.

When noting these numbers, it’s worth remembering that medical imaging is provided free of charge to athletes at the Olympics. As the authors explained in the study, this means x-rays are “not necessarily the first imaging examination performed to evaluate musculoskeletal pain."

Guermazi et al. included several other key statistics in their findings. For instance, athletes from Europe underwent the most imaging examinations overall (396), but athletes from Africa had the highest utilization rate (14.8 percent). In addition, more than 83 percent of all muscle injuries involved the athlete’s lower extremities. More than 7 percent involved the upper extremities, more than four percent involved the pelvis and more than three percent involved the chest.

The authors also tracked which days involved the most imaging exams. “Use of imaging services peaked twice during Rio 2016, first on Day 5 and then on Day 12,” the authors wrote. “The second peak may be because the athletics, or track and field events—which had the most imaging-depicted injuries among all sports—were scheduled in the latter half of the games (from Day 8 to Day 17). Similarly, the first peak may be because judo, which had the second most imaging-depicted injuries among all sports, was scheduled in the first half of the games (from Day 2 to Day 8).”