The Bayesian approximation error approach for electrical impedance tomography—experimental results

Inverse problems can be characterized as problems that tolerate measurement and modelling errors poorly. While the measurement error issue has been widely considered as a solved problem, the modelling errors have remained largely untreated. The approximation and modelling errors can, however, be argued to dominate the measurement errors in most applications. There are several applications in which the temporal and memory requirements dictate that the computational complexity of the forward solver be radically reduced. For example, in process tomography the reconstructions have to be carried out typically in a few tens of milliseconds. Recently, a Bayesian approach for the treatment of approximation and modelling errors for inverse problems has been proposed. This approach has proven to work well in several classes of problems, but the approach has not been verified in any problem with real data. In this paper, we study two different types of modelling errors in the case of electrical impedance tomography: one related to model reduction and one concerning partially unknown geometry. We show that the approach is also feasible in practice and may facilitate the reduction of the computational complexity of the nonlinear EIT problem at least by an order of magnitude.