Optimization framework for patient-specific modeling under uncertainty

Estimating a patient-specific computational model's parameters relies on data that is often unreliable and ill-suited for a deterministic approach. We develop an optimization-based uncertainty quantification framework for probabilistic model tuning that discovers model inputs distributions that generate target output distributions. Probabilistic sampling is performed using a surrogate model for computational efficiency, and a general distribution parameterization is used to describe each input. The approach is tested on seven patient-specific modeling examples using CircAdapt, a cardiovascular circulatory model. Six examples are synthetic, aiming to match the output distributions generated using known reference input data distributions, while the seventh example uses real-world patient data for the output distributions. Our results demonstrate the accurate reproduction of the target output distributions, with a correct recreation of the reference inputs for the six synthetic examples. Our proposed approach is suitable for determining the parameter distributions of patient-specific models with uncertain data and can be used to gain insights into the sensitivity of the model parameters to the measured data.