An inverse problem in estimating simultaneously the effective thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity of biological tissue

An inverse problem utilizing the Levenberg–Marquardt method (LMM) is applied in this study to determine simultaneously the unknown spatial-dependent effective thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity for a biological tissue based on temperature measurements. The accuracy of this inverse problem is examined by using the simulated exact and inexact temperature measurements in the numerical experiments. A statistical analysis is performed to obtain the 99% confidence bounds for the estimated thermal properties. Results show that good estimation on the spatial-dependent thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity can be obtained using the present algorithm for the test cases considered in this study.