Inverse Problems Group

Inverse Problems typically involve the recovery of some physical characteristics of a material from its response to some excitation such as electromagnetic fields, heat or mechanical vibrations. Inverse problems are often illposed, which means the process of recovering the unknown parameters is very sensitive to errors in the measured response.

The Inverse Problems Group looks at both practical and theoretical aspects of the subject, working closely with engineers and scientists in industrial and medical research, as well as other mathematicians.

Some of the applications of inverse problems in which we are interested

• Medical imaging using electricity (EIT), for example to reduce ventilator related lung injury
• Industrial process monitoring using electrical  measurement
• Photoelasticity - visualisation of the stress inside a transparent object
• Electromagnetic monitoring of  molten metal flow
• Airport X-ray scanners
• X-ray tomography in material science
• Next generation metal detectors for security screening

Members

Prof Bill Lionheart , E-mail Bill.Lionheart at manchester.ac.uk , Home page
Dr Oliver Dorn (Lecturer)

Dr Valery Titarenko (postdoc)
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Bartek Grychtol (part time RA funded by MIMIT Science Bridges award)
Abdul-Aziz al Humaiadi (PhD student)
Kyriakos Paridis(PhD student)
David Szotten Postdoctoral RA on PhD+ scheme
Nicola Wadeson (PhD student)
Will Thompson (postdoc)
Michael Crabb (PhD student)
Russell Miller (PhD student)

Jointly with Wolfson Centre for Molecular Imaging
Georgios Angelis
Fotis Kotasidis

Some former members

Dr Hanno Hammer,
Dr Nick Polydorides
Dr Romina Gaburro
Dr Manuchehr Soleimani Email
Dr Cees van Berkel

Help wanted

We are often on the look out for PhD students in both pure and applied aspects of inverse problems, short term post -doctoral researchers, MSc and undergraduates looking for projects or vacation work. We often have funding for small programming projects involving Finite Elements and numerical methods for Inverse Problems, usually in Matlab and c or c++. Contact Bill Lionheart.

Activities

• British Workshops on Inverse Problems, and British Inverse Problems Society
• Electrical Impedance and Diffuse Optical Tomography Reconstruction Software ( EIDORS ) project.
• MIMS Forum on Ray transform reconstruction

Some of our collaborators

Academic

• Department of Applied Physics, Kuopio, Finland
• Optical Tomography group at UCL
• EIT group at Oxford Brookes
• Department of Mathematics, Helsinki University of Technology
• Department of Mathematics, University of Trieste
• Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University
• Department of Neurophysiology, University College Hospital, London
• Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sheffield University

Industrial

• Process Tomography Limited
• Corus Group
• Sensatech
• Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol
• Philips Research Laboratories, Redhill
• QinetiQ (formerly DERA)
• CXR Ltd
• Rapiscan Ltd
• Manchester Airport

Inverse Problems at the University of Manchester

Here of some of the groups around Manchester who have interesting practical inverse problems

• The Industrial Process Tomography Group
• Centre for Residual Stress and Damage Characterization
• Wolfson Centre for Molecular Imaging
• The Virual Centre for Industrial Proces Tomography VCIPT is run jointly by Leeds and Manchester and promotes Process Tomography in Industry