A 3D boundary optimal control for the bidomain-bath system modeling the thoracic shock therapy for cardiac defibrillation (Q5964413)

An optimal control problem in a 3D domain is considered, in order to study how to perform cardiac defibrillation through an optimal thoracic electroshock treatment. A bidomain model for the heart electrical activity is coupled to a Maxwell's equation taking into account an external bathing medium. The authors prove existence and uniqueness of a weak solution of the direct problem, as well as the existence of a weak solution for the adjoint problem. In both cases they use a Faedo-Galerkin scheme. Moreover, they prove the existence of the optimal control problem to minimize a cost functional which takes into account how far (in the \(L^2\) norm) the transmembrane voltage is from a desired state by applying an external current which is sought to be as small as possible. Finally, numerical results obtained with a finite element method are provided for successful cardiac defibrillation, suggesting that the approach followed in the paper requires less total current than with the ad-hoc strategy.