Towards inductive learning of surgical task knowledge: a preliminary case study of the peg transfer task

Autonomy in robotic surgery will significantly improve the quality of interventions in terms of safety and recovery time for the patient, and reduce fatigue of surgeons and hospital costs. A key requirement for such autonomy is the ability of the surgical system to encode and reason with commonsense task knowledge, and to adapt to variations introduced by the surgical scenarios and the individual patients. However, it is difficult to encode all the variability in surgical scenarios and in the anatomy of individual patients a priori, and new knowledge often needs to be acquired and merged with the existing knowledge. At the same time, it is not possible to provide a large number of labeled training examples in the robotic surgery. This paper presents a framework based on inductive logic programming and answer set semantics for incrementally learning domain knowledge from a limited number of executions of basic surgical tasks. As an illustrative example, we focus on the peg transfer task, and learn state constraints and the preconditions of actions starting from different levels of prior knowledge. We do so using a small dataset comprising human and robotic executions with the da Vinci surgical robot in a challenging simulated scenario.