DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of Claims 1-10, 13 and 14 in the reply filed on December 29, 2025 is acknowledged.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Schleifer US2019/0368982 in view of Gurevich et al. US2018/0028079 hereinafter referred to as Gurevich.
As per Claim 1, Schleifer teaches a method of determining an amount of tissue or cell preparation exposed at a surface of a sample embedded in an embedding medium comprising:
irradiating the embedded tissue or cell preparation sample at a wavelength which causes endogenous components of the tissue to autofluoresce; (Schleifer, Paragraph [0035], “Contrary to the present methods utilize autofluorescence of endogenous fluorophores in tissue to distinguish tissue from an embedding medium such as paraffin or an epoxy resin. Contrasting between tissue and an embedding medium can be achieved by irradiating an embedded sample such as a formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue block at an appropriate wavelength, and detecting the resulting fluorescence emission”)
obtaining an image of the autofluorescence emitted by the embedded tissue or cell preparation sample; and (Schleifer, Paragraph [0039], “the imaging device comprises a camera such as a digital camera. In such cases, an embedded sample comprising tissue and an embedding medium such as paraffin is irradiated with light and the resulting fluorescence emission is captured using a digital camera. The presence of fluorescence in the digital image provides an indication that tissue is present in the sample under study”)
Schleifer does not teach determining a percentage of the image at the surface of the embedding medium which is occupied by tissue or cell preparation.
Gurevich teaches determining a percentage of the image at the surface of the embedding medium which is occupied by tissue or cell preparation. (Gurevich, Paragraph [0157], “a new subject may be evaluated by generating the subject time series of fluorescence images of the tissue under evaluation during imaging, generating the subject spatial maps as was described herein, storing such map in a database or registry, storing various data derived from the map (e.g., statistical data derived from the map such as, for example, percentage of each cluster in the map, their mean/median/standard deviation, map histogram or a combination thereof)”)
Thus it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to implement the teachings of Gurevich into Schleifer because by providing means to gather statistical data of the fluorescence images will allow further processing to be performed utilizing the gathered statistical data.
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill to combine the two references to obtain the invention in Claim 1.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-10 and 13-14 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
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/MING Y HON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2666