Physics-Informed AI

Physics-informed inference of heterogeneous physical properties from noisy observations.

Research focus

Our research in physics-informed AI focuses on inverse problems in which important physical properties cannot be measured directly but must be inferred from indirect, noisy, and limited observations. We establish physics-informed machine-learning methods that embed governing equations, such as partial differential equations from mechanics, into deep-learning models to estimate latent heterogeneous physical fields. A major application is the estimation of spatially varying bone stiffness and elastic moduli from deformation data using linear elasticity and physics-informed neural networks. This line of work aims to make AI more reliable for scientific and engineering inference by combining data, domain physics, and uncertainty-aware computational modeling.

Projects & applications

Physics-Informed Machine Learning to estimate heterogeneous stiffness (elastic moduli) of bones based on the bone deformation data

Goal: To infer the unobserved underlying elastic properties based on observed noisy deformation data using the law of physics (partial differential equation; PDE).

Methodologies: Physics-Informed Neural Network, deep neural network

PDE Equation: Linear Elasticity with heterogeneous elastic moduli

Collaborators: This work is done with a Ph.D. students, T. Srikitrungruang, S Aghaee, an undergraduate student, M. Lemon, and  Collaborator, Dr. Yuxiao Zhou.

Publications

Research diagram: Physics-Informed Machine Learning to estimate heterogeneous stiffness (elastic moduli) of bones based on the bone deformation data
Physics-Informed Machine Learning to estimate heterogeneous stiffness (elastic moduli) of bones based on the bone deformation data View full-size figure

Other research directions