A model study of instability of the inverse problem in electrocardiography (Q1183935)

The problem of electrocardiography involves finding the electrical potential on the surface of an interior region (the heart) from measurements of the potential on the boundary of a domain that surrounds it. This is modeled as an inverse elliptic problem whose known instability has to be addressed via various regularization methods. This paper discusses the instability of this problem and the nature of the regularizations that can be effectively used to find approximations of the interior surface potentials. The authors seek the best approximation to the solution to this inverse problem in the compact convex set \(T(B_ R)\), where \(B_ R\) is the ball of radius \(R\) in \((L^ 2 (\Gamma_ 0))\), \(\Gamma_ 0\) is the boundary of the interior region and \(T\) is a compact operator. They then study in detail properties of these quasi-solutions for the special case of the problem where the domain consists of the unit three-dimensional ball, the interior region is a ball centered at the origin with radius less than one, and the conductivity of the domain is assumed to be constant. Explicit expressions are obtained for the quasi-solutions and several error estimates are derived. The paper provides a clear analytic description of the instabilities that occur in this type of inverse problems.