Section: New Results

Inverse Problems

Front observer for data assimilation of electroanatomical mapping data for a numerical atrial model

Participants : Antoine Gérard [Carmen team] , Annabelle Collin [Monc team] , Jason Bayer [Carmen team] , Philippe Moireau [correspondant] , Yves Coudière [Carmen team] .

The purpose of our work is to personalize an atrial model of the propagation of the action potential, based on electrical catheter data with the help of the data assimilation approach introduced in [Collin & Al, Journal of Computational Physics 2015]. The originality of the approach is to indroduce a Luenberger observer of a surface atrial model of the propagation which can pursue - like in classical Kalman filtering approach - the actual activation front reconstructed from catheter data. Moreover, this approach may account for the breakthrough of new activation fronts at anytime with an additional topological gradient term. In the present work, we adapt this approach to the bilayer surface atrial model of th propagation of action potentials [Labarthe & Al, Europace 2014], and evaluated for the first time on a real patient's dataset. First, the model was geometrically fit to the patient's data. A fiber architecture was added to the geometry. Then an initial electrophysiological state was guessed, and the model was run with the Luenberger filter for some catheter data acquired during a CARTO procedure. All along the simulation, the filter corrects the action potential so as to track CARTO local activation times, while preserving a biophysical behavior. With this technique, we are able to reconstruct smooth activation maps over the whole atrial surfaces. This promising technique may also allow to reconstruct velocity fields and directions, phase map and possibly give information on repolarization. This work results from a collaborative project carried out during a training session at CEMRACS 2016 in Marseille, Luminy. This work has resulted in the publication [28].

Iterative observer-based state and parameter estimation for linear systems

Participant : Atte Aalto [correspondant] .

In this work we propose an iterative method for joint state and parameter estimation using measurements on a finite time interval for systems that are backward output stabilizable. Since this time interval is fixed, errors in initial state may have a big impact on the parameter estimate. We propose to use the back and forth nudging (BFN) method for estimating the system's initial state and a Gauss–Newton step between BFN iterations for estimating the system parameters. Taking advantage of results on the optimality of the BFN method, we show that for systems with skew-adjoint generators, the initial state and parameter estimate minimizing an output error cost functional is an attractive fixed point for the proposed method. We treat both linear source estimation and bilinear parameter estimation problems.

Estimation from moments measurements for amyloid depolymerisation

Participants : Aurora Armiento [Mamba team] , Marie Doumic [Mamba team] , Philippe Moireau [correspondant] .

Estimating reaction rates and size distributions of protein polymers is an important step for understanding the mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation, a key feature for amyloid diseases. This study aims at setting this framework problem when the experimental measurements consist in the time-dynamics of a moment of the population (i.e. for instance the total polymerised mass, as in Thioflavine T measurements, or the second moment measured by Static Light Scattering). We propose a general methodology, and we solve the problem theoretically and numerically in the case of a depolymerising system. We then apply our method to experimental data of degrading oligomers, and conclude that smaller aggregates of ovPrP protein should be more stable than larger ones. This has an important biological implication, since it is commonly admitted that small oligomers constitute the most cytotoxic species during prion misfolding process. This work has resulted in the publication [14].

Analysis of an observers strategy for initial state reconstruction in unbounded domains

Participants : Antoine Tonnoir [correspondant] , Sonia Fliss [Poems team] , Sébastien Imperiale, Philippe Moireau.

In this work, we are interested in the problem of recovering a compactly supported initial state of the wave equation in unbounded domain (such as the whole plane, a waveguide...). To this purpose, we assume that the velocity is known in a bounded observation region surrounding the support of the initial state. We consider an iterative algorithm of reconstruction based on back and forth nudging and prove the exponential convergence of this algorithm and its robustness with respect to noisy measures, at the continuous level. We also study the effect of the discretization process on the convergence of the algorithm.