From the 3rd to the 6th of December the 17th internal SFB meeting – winter version - took place at the Obergurgl University Centre in Tyrol, Austria. We were very pleased to welcome as invited speaker...

In our Spotlight program, we interview three mathematicians in or from Austria on a specific topic. Our topics include:

We consider the inverse problem of reconstructing the boundary curve of a cavity embedded in a bounded domain. The problem is formulated in two dimensions for the wave equation. We combine the Laguerre transform with the integral equation method and we reduce the inverse problem to a system of boundary integral equations. We propose an iterative scheme that linearizes the equation using the Fréchet derivative of the forward operator. The application of special quadrature rules results to an ill-conditioned linear system which we solve using Tikhonov regularization. The numerical results show that the proposed method produces accurate and stable reconstructions.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a widely used imaging technique in the micrometer regime, which gained accelerating interest in medical imaging in the last twenty years. In up-to-date OCT literature [5,6] certain simplifying assumptions are made for the reconstructions, but for many applications a more realistic description of the OCT imaging process is of interest. In mathematical models, for example, the incident angle of light onto the sample is usually neglected or a plane wave description for the light-sample interaction in OCT is used, which ignores almost completely the occurring effects within an OCT measurement process. In this article, we make a first step to a quantitative model by considering the measured intensity as a combination of back-scattered Gaussian beams affected by the system. In contrast to the standard plane wave simplification, the presented model includes system relevant parameters such as the position of the focus and the spot size of the incident laser beam, which allow a precise prediction of the OCT data and therefore ultimately serves as a forward model. The accuracy of the proposed model - after calibration of all necessary system parameters - is illustrated by simulations and validated by a comparison with experimental data obtained from a 1300 nm swept-source OCT system.