In the 1980's Furuta and Fintushel-Stern applied the theory of instantons and Chern-Simons invariants to develop a criterion for a collection of Seifert fibered homology spheres to be independent in the homology cobordism group of oriented homology 3-spheres. These results, together with some 4-dimensional constructions, can be used to show that iterated Whitehead doubles of positive torus knots are independent in the smooth knot concordance group.
Links:
[1] https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/taxonomy/term/39
[2] https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/node/3444
[3] https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/node/6656