ML is an expanding field. It is popular as it allows efficient processing of vast amounts of data for interpreting and real-time decision making. Already widely used in imaging and diagnosis, it is believed that ML will also play an important role in surgery and interventional treatments. In particular, ML could become a game changer into the conception of cognitive surgical robots. Such robots endowed with cognitive skills would assist the surgical team also on a cognitive level, such as possibly lowering the mental load of the team. For example, ML could help extracting surgical skill, learned through demonstration by human experts, and could transfer this to robotic skills. Such intelligent surgical assistance would significantly surpass the state of the art in surgical robotics. Current devices possess no intelligence whatsoever and are merely advanced and expensive instruments.

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In this paper we present a Common Genetic Encoding (CGE) for networks that can be applied to both direct and indirect encoding methods. As a direct encoding method, CGE allows the implicit evaluation of an encoded phenotype without the need to decode the phenotype from the genotype. On the other hand, one can easily decode the structure of a phenotype network, since its topology is implicitly encoded in the genotype's gene-order. Furthermore, we illustrate how CGE can be used for the indirect encoding of networks. CGE has useful properties that makes it suitable for evolving neural networks. A formal definition of the encoding is given, and some of the important properties of the encoding are proven such as its closure under mutation operators, its completeness in representing any phenotype network, and the existence of an algorithm that can evaluate any given phenotype without running into an infinite loop.

In recent years, neuroevolutionary methods have shown great promise in solving learning tasks, especially in domains that are stochastic, partially observable, and noisy. In this paper, we show how the Kalman filter can be exploited (1) to efficiently find an optimal solution (i. e. reducing the number of evaluations needed to find the solution), (2) to find solutions that are robust against noise, and (3) to recover or reconstruct missing state variables, traditionally known as state estimation in control engineering community. Our algorithm has been tested on the double pole balancing without velocities benchmark, and has achieved significantly better results on this benchmark than the published results of other algorithms to date.

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An accurate motion model is an important component in modern-day robotic systems, but building such a model for a complex system often requires an appreciable amount of manual effort. In this paper we present a motion model representation, the Dynamic Gaussian Mixture Model (DGMM), that alleviates the need to manually design the form of a motion model, and provides a direct means of incorporating auxiliary sensory data into the model. This representation and its accompanying algorithms are validated experimentally using an 8-legged kinematically complex robot, as well as a standard benchmark dataset. The presented method not only learns the robot's motion model, but also improves the model's accuracy by incorporating information about the terrain surrounding the robot.978-1-4244-3804-4/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE

Advances in miniaturized surgical instrumentation are key to less demanding and safer medical interventions. In cardiovascular procedures interventionalists turn towards catheter-based interventions, treating patients considered unfit for more invasive approaches. A positive outcome is not guaranteed. The risk for calcium dislodgement, tissue damage or even vessel rupture cannot be eliminated when instruments are maneuvered through fragile and diseased vessels. This paper reports on the progress made in terms of catheter design, vessel reconstruction, catheter shape modeling, surgical skill analysis, decision-making and control. These efforts are geared towards the development of the necessary technology to autonomously steer catheters through the vasculature, a target of the EU-funded project CASCADE (Cognitive AutonomouS CAtheters operating in Dynamic Environments). Whereas autonomous placement of an aortic valve implant forms the ultimate and concrete goal, the technology of individual building blocks to reach such ambitious goal is expected to be much sooner impacting and assisting interventionalists in their daily clinical practice.