Teach Me How to Learn: A Perspective Review towards User-centered Neuro-symbolic Learning for Robotic Surgical Systems
This work addresses the problem of improving interpretability and efficiency in robotic surgical systems for surgeons, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hybrid learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of lack of interpretation and transferability in black-box machine learning models for robotic surgical systems by proposing a user-centered neuro-symbolic learning paradigm with expert feedback, focusing on surgical robotics to address challenges in autonomous systems and surgeon interaction.
Recent advances in machine learning models allowed robots to identify objects on a perceptual nonsymbolic level (e.g., through sensor fusion and natural language understanding). However, these primarily black-box learning models still lack interpretation and transferability and require high data and computational demand. An alternative solution is to teach a robot on both perceptual nonsymbolic and conceptual symbolic levels through hybrid neurosymbolic learning approaches with expert feedback (i.e., human-in-the-loop learning). This work proposes a concept for this user-centered hybrid learning paradigm that focuses on robotic surgical situations. While most recent research focused on hybrid learning for non-robotic and some generic robotic domains, little work focuses on surgical robotics. We survey this related research while focusing on human-in-the-loop surgical robotic systems. This evaluation highlights the most prominent solutions for autonomous surgical robots and the challenges surgeons face when interacting with these systems. Finally, we envision possible ways to address these challenges using online apprenticeship learning based on implicit and explicit feedback from expert surgeons.