An inverse boundary value problem arising from cardiac electrophisiology

The cardiac electrical activity can be comprehensively described throughout the monodomain model, consisting of a semilinear parabolic equation coupled with a nonlinear ordinary differential equation.

In my talk, I will introduce the inverse problem of identifying conductivity inhomogeneities in the monodomain system, taking advantage of data acquired on the boundary of the domain. Due to the complexity of the task, I will first tackle the stationary counterpart of the problem, regarding which it is possible to formulate well-posedness results both for the forward and for the inverse problem, and to rigorously introduce reconstruction procedures. Similar results are then generalized to the full complexity of the original model.


Throughout the presentation, I will focus on the problem of localizing small size inhomogeneities, as well as arbitrarily large ones, by means of the constraint optimization of a suitable misfit functional. The first task is achieved by relying on an asymptotic expansion of the boundary voltage with respect to the size of the inclusion, and employing tools from the topological optimization theory. The second issue is analyzed by means of the regularization theory of inverse problems and introducing a convenient relaxation of the optimization problem. The theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments, which are exhaustively reported.


This is a joint work with Elena Beretta, Cristina Cerutti, Cecilia Cavaterra, Andrea Manzoni and Marco Verani.