Left and right preconditioning for electrical impedance tomography with structural information

Abstract

A common problem in computational inverse problems is to find an efficient way of solving linear or nonlinear least-squares problems. For large-scale problems, iterative solvers are the method of choice for solving the associated linear systems, and for nonlinear problems, an additional effective local linearization method is required. In this paper, we discuss an efficient preconditioning scheme for Krylov subspace methods, based on the Bayesian analysis of the inverse problem. The model problem to which we apply this methodology is electrical impedance tomography (EIT) augmented with prior information coming from a complementary modality, such as x-ray imaging. The particular geometry considered here models the x-ray-guided EIT for breast imaging. The interest in applying EIT concurrently with x-ray breast imaging arises from the experimental observation that the impedivity spectra of certain types of malignant and benign tissues differ significantly from each other, thus offering a possibility of diagnosis without more invasive tissue sampling. After setting up the EIT inverse problem within a Bayesian framework, we present an inner and outer iteration scheme for computing a maximum a posteriori estimate. The prior covariance provides a right preconditioner and the modeling error covariance provides a left preconditioner for the iterative method used to solve the linear least-squares problem at each outer iteration of the optimization problem. Moreover, the stopping criterion for the inner iterations is coupled with the progress of the solution of the outer iteration. Besides the preconditioning scheme, the computational efficiency relies on a very efficient method to compute the Jacobian, obtained by carefully organizing the forward computation. Computed examples illustrate the robustness and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm.