3,990 research outputs found
Identification of weakly coupled multiphysics problems. Application to the inverse problem of electrocardiography
This work addresses the inverse problem of electrocardiography from a new
perspective, by combining electrical and mechanical measurements. Our strategy
relies on the defini-tion of a model of the electromechanical contraction which
is registered on ECG data but also on measured mechanical displacements of the
heart tissue typically extracted from medical images. In this respect, we
establish in this work the convergence of a sequential estimator which combines
for such coupled problems various state of the art sequential data assimilation
methods in a unified consistent and efficient framework. Indeed we ag-gregate a
Luenberger observer for the mechanical state and a Reduced Order Unscented
Kalman Filter applied on the parameters to be identified and a POD projection
of the electrical state. Then using synthetic data we show the benefits of our
approach for the estimation of the electrical state of the ventricles along the
heart beat compared with more classical strategies which only consider an
electrophysiological model with ECG measurements. Our numerical results
actually show that the mechanical measurements improve the identifiability of
the electrical problem allowing to reconstruct the electrical state of the
coupled system more precisely. Therefore, this work is intended to be a first
proof of concept, with theoretical justifications and numerical investigations,
of the ad-vantage of using available multi-modal observations for the
estimation and identification of an electromechanical model of the heart
DTI denoising for data with low signal to noise ratios
Low signal to noise ratio (SNR) experiments in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) give key information about tracking and anisotropy, e. g., by measurements with small voxel sizes or with high b values. However, due to the complicated and dominating impact of thermal noise such data are still seldom analysed. In this paper Monte Carlo simulations are presented which investigate the distributions of noise for different DTI variables in low SNR situations. Based on this study a strategy for the application of spatial smoothing is derived. Optimal prerequisites for spatial filters are unbiased, bell shaped distributions with uniform variance, but, only few variables have a statistics close to that. To construct a convenient filter a chain of nonlinear Gaussian filters is adapted to peculiarities of DTI and a bias correction is introduced. This edge preserving three dimensional filter is then validated via a quasi realistic model. Further, it is shown that for small sample sizes the filter is as effective as a maximum likelihood estimator and produces reliable results down to a local SNR of approximately 1. The filter is finally applied to very recent data with isotropic voxels of the size 1Ć1Ć1mm^3 which corresponds to a spatially mean SNR of 2.5. This application demonstrates the statistical robustness of the filter method. Though the Rician noise model is only approximately realized in the data, the gain of information by spatial smoothing is considerable
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