A direct linear inversion for discontinuous elastic parameters recovery from internal displacement information only (Q1996224)

In this paper a new direct method for solving the linear elasticity inverse problem from domain measurements is proposed. The basic idea consists in formulating an inverse variational problem in which the measured displacements appear as known parameters whereas the unknowns are given by the coefficients characterizing the elasticity tensor to be reconstructed, inducing the stiffness-to-force operator. In particular, shear modulus, Lamé coefficients and full anisotropic elasticity tensor reconstructions are considered. The stability results are stated under weak regularity assumption, accounting for discontinuities on the coefficients of the elasticity tensor, which represents the main theoretical contribution of the paper. The resulting inverse weak formulation is discretized by using standard finite element method. A regularization procedure is also proposed in order to handle numerical instabilities. Finally, a nice set of numerical examples is presented showing different features of the proposed approach, including its low computational cost, resilience with respect to noisy data and potential application to the in vivo assessment of elastic properties of tissue.