Library

Description: Aims. Detection and quantification of myocardial scars are helpful both for diagnosis of heart diseases and for building personalized simulation models. Scar tissue is generally charac­terized by a different conduction of electrical excitation. We aim at estimating conductivity-related parameters from endocardial mapping data, in particular the conductivity tensor. Solving this inverse problem requires computationally expensive monodomain simulations on fine discretizations. Therefore, we aim at accelerating the estimation using a multilevel method combining electrophysiology models of different complexity, namely the mono­domain and the eikonal model. Methods. Distributed parameter estimation is performed by minimizing the misfit between simulated and measured electrical activity on the endocardial surface, subject to the mono­domain model and regularization, leading to a constrained optimization problem. We formulate this optimization problem, including the modeling of scar tissue and different regularizations, and design an efficient iterative solver. We consider monodomain grid hierarchies and monodomain-eikonal model hierarchies in a recursive multilevel trust-region method. Results. From several numerical examples, both the efficiency of the method and the estimation quality, depending on the data, are investigated. The multilevel solver is significantly faster than a comparable single level solver. Endocardial mapping data of realistic density appears to be just sufficient to provide quantitatively reasonable estimates of location, size, and shape of scars close to the endocardial surface. Conclusion. In several situations, scar reconstruction based on eikonal and monodomain models differ significantly, suggesting the use of the more accurate but more expensive monodomain model for this purpose. Still, eikonal models can be utilized to accelerate the computations considerably, enabling the use of complex electrophysiology models for estimating myocardial scars from endocardial mapping data.

Description: Governing equations are essential to the study of nonlinear dynamics, often enabling the prediction of previously unseen behaviors as well as the inclusion into control strategies. The discovery of governing equations from data thus has the potential to transform data-rich fields where well-established dynamical models remain unknown. This work contributes to the recent trend in data-driven sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics of finding the best sparse fit to observational data in a large library of potential nonlinear models. We propose an efficient first-order Conditional Gradient algorithm for solving the underlying optimization problem. In comparison to the most prominent alternative algorithms, the new algorithm shows significantly improved performance on several essential issues like sparsity-induction, structure-preservation, noise robustness, and sample efficiency. We demonstrate these advantages on several dynamics from the field of synchronization, particle dynamics, and enzyme chemistry.

Description: The growing discrepancy between CPU computing power and memory bandwidth drives more and more numerical algorithms into a bandwidth-bound regime. One example is the overlapping Schwarz smoother, a highly effective building block for iterative multigrid solution of elliptic equations with higher order finite elements. Two options of reducing the required memory bandwidth are sparsity exploiting storage layouts and representing matrix entries with reduced precision in floating point or fixed point format. We investigate the impact of several options on storage demand and contraction rate, both analytically in the context of subspace correction methods and numerically at an example of solid mechanics. Both perspectives agree on the favourite scheme: fixed point representation of Cholesky factors in nested dissection storage.

Description: We consider a linear iterative solver for large scale linearly constrained quadratic minimization problems that arise, for example, in optimization with PDEs. By a primal-dual projection (PDP) iteration, which can be interpreted and analysed as a gradient method on a quotient space, the given problem can be solved by computing sulutions for a sequence of constrained surrogate problems, projections onto the feasible subspaces, and Lagrange multiplier updates. As a major application we consider a class of optimization problems with PDEs, where PDP can be applied together with a projected cg method using a block triangular constraint preconditioner. Numerical experiments show reliable and competitive performance for an optimal control problem in elasticity.