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 definition 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 aggregate 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 advantage of using available multi-modal observations for the estimation and identification of an electromechanical model of the heart. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.