Contents Online
Communications in Mathematical Sciences
Volume 16 (2018)
Number 7
Detection of conductivity inclusions in a semilinear elliptic problem arising from cardiac electrophysiology
Pages: 1975 – 2002
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/CMS.2018.v16.n7.a10
Authors
Abstract
In this work we tackle the reconstruction of discontinuous coefficients in a semilinear elliptic equation from the knowledge of the solution on the boundary of the planar bounded domain. The problem is motivated by an application in cardiac electrophysiology.
We formulate a constraint minimization problem involving a quadratic mismatch functional enhanced with a regularization term which penalizes the perimeter of the inclusion to be identified. We introduce a phase-field relaxation of the problem, employing a Ginzburg–Landau-type energy and assessing the $\Gamma$-convergence of the relaxed functional to the original one. After computing the optimality conditions of the phase-field optimization problem and introducing a discrete finite element formulation, we propose an iterative algorithm and prove convergence properties. Several numerical results are reported, assessing the effectiveness and the robustness of the algorithm in identifying arbitrarily-shaped inclusions.
Finally, we compare our approach to a shape derivative based technique, both from a theoretical point of view (computing the sharp interface limit of the optimality conditions) and from a numerical one.
Keywords
inverse problem, semilinear elliptic equation, phase-field relaxation
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification
35J61, 35R30, 65N21
Received 31 January 2018
Accepted 12 July 2018
Published 7 March 2019