Viscoelastic modulus reconstruction using time harmonic vibrations

This paper presents a new iterative reconstruction method to provide high-resolution images of shear modulus and viscosity via the internal measurement of displacement fields in tissues. To solve the inverse problem, we compute the Fr\'echet derivatives of the least-squares discrepancy functional with respect to the shear modulus and shear viscosity. The proposed iterative reconstruction method using this Fr\'echet derivative does not require any differentiation of the displacement data for the full isotropic linearly viscoelastic model, whereas the standard reconstruction methods require at least double differentiation. Because the minimization problem is ill-posed and highly nonlinear, this adjoint-based optimization method needs a very well-matched initial guess. We find a good initial guess. For a well-matched initial guess, numerical experiments show that the proposed method considerably improves the quality of the reconstructed viscoelastic images.Comment: 15 page

Lam\'e Parameter Estimation from Static Displacement Field Measurements in the Framework of Nonlinear Inverse Problems

We consider a problem of quantitative static elastography, the estimation of the Lam\'e parameters from internal displacement field data. This problem is formulated as a nonlinear operator equation. To solve this equation, we investigate the Landweber iteration both analytically and numerically. The main result of this paper is the verification of a nonlinearity condition in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space context. This condition guarantees convergence of iterative regularization methods. Furthermore, numerical examples for recovery of the Lam\'e parameters from displacement data simulating a static elastography experiment are presented.Comment: 29 page

Constitutive Models for Tumour Classification

The aim of this paper is to formulate new mathematical models that will be able to differentiate not only between normal and abnormal tissues, but, more importantly, between benign and malignant tumours. We present preliminary results of a tri-phasic model and numerical simulations of the effect of cellular adhesion forces on the mechanical properties of biological tissues. We pursued the following three approaches: (i) the simulation of the time-harmonic linear elastic models to examine coarse scale effects and adhesion properties, (ii) the investigation of a tri-phasic model, with the intent of upscaling this model to determine effects of electro-mechanical coupling between cells, and (iii) the upscaling of a simple cell model as a framework for studying interface conditions at malignant cells. Each of these approaches has opened exciting new directions of research that we plan to study in the future

Progress on the Strong Eshelby's Conjecture and Extremal Structures for the Elastic Moment Tensor

We make progress towards proving the strong Eshelby's conjecture in three dimensions. We prove that if for a single nonzero uniform loading the strain inside inclusion is constant and further the eigenvalues of this strain are either all the same or all distinct, then the inclusion must be of ellipsoidal shape. As a consequence, we show that for two linearly independent loadings the strains inside the inclusions are uniform, then the inclusion must be of ellipsoidal shape. We then use this result to address a problem of determining the shape of an inclusion when the elastic moment tensor (elastic polarizability tensor) is extremal. We show that the shape of inclusions, for which the lower Hashin-Shtrikman bound either on the bulk part or on the shear part of the elastic moment tensor is attained, is an ellipse in two dimensions and an ellipsoid in three dimensions