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Hierarchical Task Networks as Domain-Specific Language for Planning Surgical Interventions

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Intelligent Autonomous Systems 13

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 302))

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Abstract

The following paper addresses the challenges of defining surgical workflows. Surgical workflows have to deal with medical and technical aspects on different levels of abstraction in order to ensure safety. We propose hierarchical task networks (HTN) as a unifying domain-specific language (DSL) for the definition of surgical workflows. The DSL describes relations and dependencies in state sequences and surgical actions for complex workflows on varying levels of detail. With an HTN planner we are able to decompose high-level steps into primitive actions and identify all possible workflows together with their paths through the intervention. This information can be used to identify missing or inaccurate information in literature and consequently improve the workflow and safety of the surgical intervention. By means of a case study we present a detailed HTN-based DSL for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy to show the advantage of using our particular approach to workflow modeling.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The plan results were measured single-threaded using SBCL 1.0.55 running SHOP2 version 2.9.0 on an Intel i5 CPU with 3.30 GHz.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by the coordination action EuroSurge (Grant No. 288233) funded by the European Commission in the 7th EC framework program and by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within project I05, SFB/TRR 125 “Cognition-Guided Surgery”. The authors thank the DFG and the EU for its financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Intelligent Process Control and Robotics Lab (IPR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Andreas Bihlmaier, Luzie Schreiter, Jörg Raczkowsky & Heinz Wörn

Authors
  1. Andreas Bihlmaier
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  2. Luzie Schreiter
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  3. Jörg Raczkowsky
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  4. Heinz Wörn
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Bihlmaier .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Emanuele Menegatti

  2. Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Nathan Michael

  3. Fachbereich Informatik, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern Arbeitsgruppe Robotersysteme, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Karsten Berns

  4. Integrated Information Technology, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

    Hiroaki Yamaguchi

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Bihlmaier, A., Schreiter, L., Raczkowsky, J., Wörn, H. (2016). Hierarchical Task Networks as Domain-Specific Language for Planning Surgical Interventions. In: Menegatti, E., Michael, N., Berns, K., Yamaguchi, H. (eds) Intelligent Autonomous Systems 13. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08338-4_79

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08338-4_79

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08337-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08338-4

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