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Section: Research Program

Simulation with data interaction

The second research axis of COMMEDIA is devoted to the interaction of numerical simulations with measured data. Several research directions related to two specific applications are described below: blood flows and cardiac electrophysiology, for which the mathematical models have been validated against experimental data. This list is not exhaustive and additional problems (related to cardiac and respiratory flows) shall be considered depending on the degree of maturity of the developed models.

Fluid flow reconstruction from medical imaging

A first problem which is currently under study at COMMEDIA is the reconstruction of the flow state from Doppler ultrasound measurements. This is a cheap and largely available imaging modality where the measure can be interpreted as the average on a voxel of the velocity along the direction of the ultrasound beam. The goal is to perform a full-state estimation in a time compatible with a realistic application.

A second problem which is relevant is the flow and wall dynamics reconstruction using 4D-flow MRI. This imaging modality is richer than Doppler ultrasound and provides directly a measure of the 3D velocity field in the voxels. This enables the use of direct estimation methods at a reduced computational cost with respect to the traditional variational data assimilation approaches. Yet, the sensitivity of the results to subsampling and noise is still not well understood.

We also propose to address the issues related to uncertainty quantification. Indeed, measurements are corrupted by noise and the parameters as well as the available data of the system are either hidden or not known exactly (see [59]). This uncertainty makes the estimation difficult and has a large impact on the precision of the reconstruction, to be quantified in order to provide a reliable tool.

Inverse problem in electro-cardiography

The objective of the inverse problem in electro-cardiography is to recover information about the cardiac electrical activity from electrical measurements on the body surface (for instance from electrocardiograms). We propose to investigate approaches based on recent methods for the Cauchy problem reported in [42]. Basically, the idea consists in regularizing the discrete inverse problem using stabilized finite element methods, without the need of integrating a priori knowledge of the solution, only regularity on the exact solution is required.

Safety pharmacology

One of the the most important problems in pharmacology is cardio-toxicity (see [58]). The objective is to predict whether or not a molecule alters in a significant way the normal functioning of the cardiac cells. This problem can be formulated as inferring the impact of a drug on the ionic currents of each cell based on the measured electrical signal (e.g., electrograms from Micro-Electrodes Arrays). The proposed approach in collaboration with two industrial partners (NOTOCORD and Ncardia) consists in combining available realistic data with virtual ones obtained by numerical simulations. These two datasets can be used to construct efficient classifiers and regressors using machine learning tools (see [41]) and hence providing a rapid way to estimate the impact of a molecule on the electrical activity. The methodological aspects of this work are addressed in Section 3.3.3.