Derivative-Free Recovery of a Nonlinearity in a Free-Boundary DCIS Model

Abstract

We investigate an inverse coefficient problem for a multidimensional free-boundary model of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), in which the tumor interface is governed by the nonlinear coupling of nutrient concentration, tissue pressure and curvature, and the unknown nutrient consumption function is recovered from a temporal trace of the nutrient concentration obtained by needle aspiration biopsy. For the forward problem, we establish uniform local well-posedness over an admissible class of consumption functions. The inverse problem is recast as a fixed-point problem: approximating the admissible set by finite-dimensional spaces yields discrete iteration operators, for which we prove the existence of fixed points, and the strong convergence of a subsequence of discrete fixed points to a fixed point of the continuous operator, which solves the inverse problem under a consistency condition. To approximate these fixed points, we develop a homotopy-continuation method combining a linearly convergent Picard iteration with a cubical Sperner search, without differentiating an objective functional or computing an adjoint state. Several numerical experiments on radially symmetric and non-symmetric DCIS models corroborate the theoretical findings.