An adaptive regularization algorithm for recovering the rate constant distribution from biosensor data

We present here the theoretical results and numerical analysis of a regularization method for the inverse problem of determining the rate constant distribution from biosensor data. The rate constant distribution method is a modern technique to study binding equilibrium and kinetics for chemical reactions. Finding a rate constant distribution from biosensor data can be described as a multidimensional Fredholm integral equation of the first kind, which is a typical ill-posed problem in the sense of J. Hadamard. By combining regularization theory and the goal-oriented adaptive discretization technique, we develop an Adaptive Interaction Distribution Algorithm (AIDA) for the reconstruction of rate constant distributions. The mesh refinement criteria are proposed based on the a posteriori error estimation of the finite element approximation. The stability of the obtained approximate solution with respect to data noise is proven. Finally, numerical tests for both synthetic and real data are given to show the robustness of the AIDA.