On numerical resolution of an inverse Cauchy problem modeling the airflow in the bronchial tree

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the numerical resolution of an inverse Cauchy problem governed by Stokes equation modeling the airflow in the lungs. It consists in determining the air velocity and pressure on the artificial boundaries of the bronchial tree. This data completion problem is one of the highly ill-posed problems in the Hadamard sense (Hadamard in Lectures on Cauchy’s problem in linear partial differential equations. Dover, New York, 1953). This gives great importance to its numerical resolution and in particular to carry out stable numerical approaches, mostly in the case of noisy data. The main idea of this work is to extend some regularizing, stable and fast iterative algorithms for solving this problem based on the domain decomposition approach (Chakib et al. in Inverse Prob 35(1):015008, 2018). We discuss the efficiency and the feasibility of the proposed approach through some numerical tests performed using different domain decomposition algorithms. Finally, we opt for the Robin–Robin algorithm, which showed its performance, for the numerical simulation of the airflow in the bronchial tree configuration.