skip to main content


Title: A path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) method based on Feynman-Kac formula for electrical impedance tomography
A path integral Monte Carlo method (PIMC) based on a Feynman-Kac formula for the Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions is proposed to solve the forward problem of the electrical impedance tomography (EIT). The forward problem is an important part of iterative algorithms of the inverse EIT problem, and the proposed PIMC provides a local solution to find the potentials and currents on individual electrodes. Improved techniques are proposed to compute with better accuracy both the local time of reflecting Brownian motions (RBMs) and the Feynman-Kac formula for mixed boundary problems of the Laplace equation. Accurate voltage-to-current maps on the electrodes of a model 3-D EIT problem with eight electrodes are obtained by solving a mixed boundary problem with the proposed PIMC method.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1950471
NSF-PAR ID:
10475018
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Elsevier
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Computational Physics
Volume:
476
Issue:
C
ISSN:
0021-9991
Page Range / eLocation ID:
111862
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
["EIT","Reflecting Brownian motion","Boundary local time","Feynman-Kac formula","Laplace equation","Mixed boundary problem"]
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Buttazzo, G. ; Casas, E. ; de Teresa, L. ; Glowinski, R. ; Leugering, G. ; Trélat, E. ; Zhang, X. (Ed.)
    An optimal control problem is considered for a stochastic differential equation with the cost functional determined by a backward stochastic Volterra integral equation (BSVIE, for short). This kind of cost functional can cover the general discounting (including exponential and non-exponential) situations with a recursive feature. It is known that such a problem is time-inconsistent in general. Therefore, instead of finding a global optimal control, we look for a time-consistent locally near optimal equilibrium strategy. With the idea of multi-person differential games, a family of approximate equilibrium strategies is constructed associated with partitions of the time intervals. By sending the mesh size of the time interval partition to zero, an equilibrium Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB, for short) equation is derived, through which the equilibrium value function and an equilibrium strategy are obtained. Under certain conditions, a verification theorem is proved and the well-posedness of the equilibrium HJB is established. As a sort of Feynman–Kac formula for the equilibrium HJB equation, a new class of BSVIEs (containing the diagonal value Z ( r , r ) of Z (⋅ , ⋅)) is naturally introduced and the well-posedness of such kind of equations is briefly presented. 
    more » « less
  2. Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a well-known imaging technique for detecting the electrical properties of an object in order to detect anomalies, such as conductive or resistive targets. More specifically, EIT has many applications in medical imaging for the detection and location of bodily tumors since it is an affordable and non-invasive method, which aims to recover the internal conductivity of a body using voltage measurements resulting from applying low frequency current at electrodes placed at its surface. Mathematically, the reconstruction of the internal conductivity is a severely ill-posed inverse problem and yields a poor quality image reconstruction. To remedy this difficulty, at least in part, we regularize and solve the nonlinear minimization problem by the aid of a Krylov subspace-type method for the linear sub problem during each iteration. In EIT, a tumor or general anomaly can be modeled as a piecewise constant perturbation of a smooth background, hence, we solve the regularized problem on a subspace of relatively small dimension by the Flexible Golub-Kahan process that provides solutions that have sparse representation. For comparison, we use a well-known modified Gauss–Newton algorithm as a benchmark. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained reconstructions indicate that the Krylov subspace method is better adapted to solve the ill-posed EIT problem and results in higher resolution images and faster convergence compared to reconstructions using the modified Gauss–Newton algorithm. 
    more » « less
  3. Solovjovs, Sergejs (Ed.)
    In the present paper, we summarize the results of the research devoted to the problem of stability of the fluid flow moving in a channel with flexible walls and interacting with the walls. The walls of the vessel are subject to traveling waves. Experimental data show that the energy of the flowing fluid can be transferred and consumed by the structure (the walls), inducing “traveling wave flutter.” The problem of stability of fluid-structure interaction splits into two parts: (a) stability of fluid flow in the channel with harmonically moving walls and (b) stability of solid structure participating in the energy exchange with the flow. Stability of fluid flow, the main focus of the research, is obtained by solving the initial boundary value problem for the stream function. The main findings of the paper are the following: (i) rigorous formulation of the initial boundary problem for the stream function, ψ x , y , t , induced by the fluid-structure interaction model, which takes into account the axisymmetric pattern of the flow and “no-slip” condition near the channel walls; (ii) application of a double integral transformation (the Fourier transformation and Laplace transformation) to both the equation and boundary and initial conditions, which reduces the original partial differential equation to a parameter-dependent ordinary differential equation; (iii) derivation of the explicit formula for the Fourier transform of the stream function, ψ ˜ k , y , t ; (iv) evaluation of the inverse Fourier transform of ψ ˜ k , y , t and proving that reconstruction of ψ x , y , t can be obtained through a limiting process in the complex k -plane, which allows us to use the Residue theorem and represent the solution in the form of an infinite series of residues. The result of this research is an analytical solution describing blood flowing through a channel with flexible walls that are being perturbed in the form of a traveling wave. 
    more » « less
  4. The aim of this work is to present a sampling-based algorithm designed to solve various classes of stochastic differential games. The foundation of the proposed approach lies in the formulation of the game solution in terms of a decoupled pair of forward and backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs). In light of the nonlinear version of the Feynman–Kac lemma, probabilistic representations of solutions to the nonlinear Hamilton–Jacobi–Isaacs equations that arise for each class are obtained. These representations are in form of decoupled systems of FBSDEs, which may be solved numerically. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    In this paper, the authors propose a new dimension reduction method for level-set-based topology optimization of conforming thermal structures on free-form surfaces. Both the Hamilton-Jacobi equation and the Laplace equation, which are the two governing PDEs for boundary evolution and thermal conduction, are transformed from the 3D manifold to the 2D rectangular domain using conformal parameterization. The new method can significantly simplify the computation of topology optimization on a manifold without loss of accuracy. This is achieved due to the fact that the covariant derivatives on the manifold can be represented by the Euclidean gradient operators multiplied by a scalar with the conformal mapping. The original governing equations defined on the 3D manifold can now be properly modified and solved on a 2D domain. The objective function, constraint, and velocity field are also equivalently computed with the FEA on the 2D parameter domain with the properly modified form. In this sense, we are solving a 3D topology optimization problem equivalently on the 2D parameter domain. This reduction in dimension can greatly reduce the computing cost and complexity of the algorithm. The proposed concept is proved through two examples of heat conduction on manifolds. 
    more » « less