We study the topological 4-dimensional surgery problem for a closed connected orientable topological 4-manifold $X$ with vanishing second homotopy and ${{\pi }_{1}}\left( X \right)\,\cong \,A\,*\,F\left( r \right)$ , where $A$ has one end and $F\left( r \right)$ is the free group of rank $r\,\ge \,1$. Our result is related to a theorem of Krushkal and Lee, and depends on the validity of the Novikov conjecture for such fundamental groups.

Let G be a locally compact group acting smoothly and properly by isometries on a complete Riemannian manifold M, with compact quotient G\M. There is an assembly map which associates to any G-equivariant K-homology class on M, an element of the topological K-theory of a suitable Banach completion of the convolution algebra of continuous compactly supported functions on G. The aim of this paper is to calculate the composition of the assembly map with the Chern character in entire cyclic homology . We prove an index theorem reducing this computation to a cup-product in bivariant entire cyclic cohomology. As a consequence we obtain an explicit localization formula which includes, as particular cases, the equivariant Atiyah-Segal-Singer index theorem when G is compact, and the Connes-Moscovici index theorem for G-coverings when G is discrete. The proof is based on the bivariant Chern character introduced in previous papers.