An information-theoretic framework for optimal design: analysis of protocols for estimating soft tissue parameters in biaxial experiments

Ankush Aggarwal (1) , Damiano Lombardi (2) , Sanjay Pant (3)

1 James Watt School of Engineering [Univ Glasgow]
2 COMMEDIA - COmputational Mathematics for bio-MEDIcal Applications
3 Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering [Swansea]

A new framework for optimal design based on the information-theoretic measures of mutual information, conditional mutual information, and their combination is proposed. The framework is tested on the analysis of protocols-combination of angles along which strain measurements can be acquired-in a biaxial experiment of soft tissues for the estimation of hyperelastic constitutive model parameters. The proposed framework sees information gain about the parameters from the experiment as the key criterion to be maximised which can be directly used for optimal design. Information gain is computed through k-nearest neighbour algorithms applied to the joint samples of the parameters and measurements produced by the forward and observation models. For biaxial experiments, the results show that low angles have relatively low information content compared to high angles. They also show that fewer number of angles with suitably chosen combinations can result in higher information gains when compared to a larger number of angles which are poorly combined. Finally, it is shown that the proposed framework is consistent with classical approaches, particularly the D-optimal design.

Mots clés: An information-theoretic optimal design; Soft tissue mechanics; Mutual information; Biaxial experiment; Inverse problems; Information theory

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Ankush Aggarwal, Damiano Lombardi, Sanjay Pant. An information-theoretic framework for optimal design: analysis of protocols for estimating soft tissue parameters in biaxial experiments. Axioms, 2021. ⟨hal-03187110⟩