University Honors

Inversion ankle sprains, or IAS, occur very often in everyday life, mostly during sports and exercise. Detecting and evaluating the severity of an IAS are very important, but we need to understand how to differentiate a normal ankle from an injured one. The goals of this Capstone project are to find out what internal properties are impacted by inversion ankle sprains and how they change the functions of the ankle ligament complex and to quantitatively differentiate between a normal ankle and one affected by an IAS. In order to complete these goals, we developed a mathematical model and simulated the stress relaxation behavior of the normal and sprained ankles on MATLAB. We conducted a literature review on the possible differential equations we could possibly use that calculate stress over time, we calibrated the possible options for equations using experimental data from literature and then chose the best fitting equation as our mathematical model, and then we tested our chosen equation on virtual patient data to reveal the differences in the model parameters between the normal and injured ankles. This would hopefully increase our understanding of how we can assess ankle sprains, and doctors and physicians can make more accurate diagnoses and create the best treatment necessary to heal these types of injuries.