An inverse problem in estimating simultaneously the effective thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity of biological tissue

An inverse problem utilizing the Levenberg-Marquardt method (LMM) is applied in this study to determine simultaneously the unknown spatial-dependent effective thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity for a biological tissue based on temperature measurements. The accuracy of this inverse problem is examined by using the simulated exact and inexact temperature measurements in the numerical experiments. A statistical analysis is performed to obtain the 99% confidence bounds for the estimated thermal properties. Results show that good estimation on the spatial-dependent thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity can be obtained using the present algorithm for the test cases considered in this study. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.