Section: Research Program

Inverse problems with actual data – Fundamental formulation, mathematical analysis and applications

A major challenge in the context of biomechanical modeling – and more generally in modeling for life sciences – lies in using the large amount of data available on the system to circumvent the lack of absolute modeling ground truth, since every system considered is in fact patient-specific, with possibly non-standard conditions associated with a disease. We have already developed original strategies for solving this particular type of inverse problems by adopting the observer stand-point. The idea we proposed consists in incorporating to the classical discretization of the mechanical system an estimator filter that can use the data to improve the quality of the global approximation, and concurrently identify some uncertain parameters possibly related to a diseased state of the patient. Therefore, our strategy leads to a coupled model-data system solved similarly to a usual PDE-based model, with a computational cost directly comparable to classical Galerkin approximations. We have already worked on the formulation, the mathematical and numerical analysis of the resulting system – see [5] – and the demonstration of the capabilities of this approach in the context of identification of constitutive parameters for a heart model with real data, including medical imaging, see [3].