[Source: Disability Scoop]

A child with cerebral palsy can have a surgery in which a muscle is disconnected from the front of the knee and reattached to the back of the leg.

The surgery could improve the child’s mobility by correcting the way the muscles move. Or it could make the child even more likely to lose balance and fall while tripping.

Right now, there’s no way to know for sure which children with cerebral palsy could be helped by the surgery, which is done fairly frequently. But, thanks to research by a University of Tennessee doctoral student, in a couple of years doctors may be able to predict which children would do well with the surgery and which ones would be better off without it.

Misagh Mansouri, a doctoral student in UT’s College of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, has been working on that project since he came to UT from Iran in 2009. Mansouri has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and intended to get a doctorate in that field, but he switched to biomechanical engineering because he liked the idea of his research being “more useful to society.”

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