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In sports medicine, one of the diagnostic challenges in daily practice is to distinguish between subtle osseous injuries and non-specific bone oedema. 1 This is especially true for the diagnostic and management of bone stress injuries, representing 1.5–5.7 injuries per 100 000 athlete exposures in sports, and 5%–10% of new recruits’ problems in the initial 2–3 months of basic training.2 While MRI is the gold standard for soft tissue and bone marrow evaluation, it often lacks the spatial resolution needed to visualise fine cortical disruptions or subtle fracture lines. Such a spatial resolution allows for a precise and complete diagnosis,3 which would be useful, for example, to grade bone stress injuries and, in turn, optimise their management.2 A new generation of MRI sequences, producing so-called CT-like images, is rapidly emerging as a powerful adjunct to conventional imaging.4 Therefore, we aim through this editorial to present the clinical relevance of CT-like MRI sequences and encourage their use in sports medicine.