DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1, 7, 8, 14, and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) / 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Peng et al (US 20200250821 A1).
Referring to claims 1 and 7:
Peng et al disclose a method for evaluating diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity, the method comprising:
receiving input data comprising at least color fundus imaging data for an eye of a subject (par. 85: a fundus picture of a to-be-predicted patient of a severity degree or range of the DR disease (normal, mild non-proliferative, moderate non-proliferative, severe non-proliferative, or proliferative) according to a classification result; and par. 120: color picture obtained by photographing);
performing at least one image standardization procedure on the color fundus imaging data (par. 34-35, 42-46: using a first neural network model being obtained by training a parameter in a second neural network model by using a first training set and a second training set, returning a first recognition result indicating the pathological feature recognized from the target picture, a color fundus image);
generating a set of standardized image data (corresponds to the training pictures); and
generating, using at least the standardized image data, a metric indicating a probability that a score for DR severity in the eye of the subject falls within a selected range using a neural network (par. 83-89: using the training pictures and the DR classification model (second neural network model), the probability is determined of the current fundus image corresponding to a DR severity falling in a selected range, referred to above).
Referring to claims 8 and 14:
Peng et al disclose (par. 9-10, 47, 117, 165-166, 179) a system for evaluating diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity, the system comprising a non-transitory memory and one or more processors coupled to the non-transitory memory and configured to read instructions from the non-transitory memory to cause the system to perform the method steps (operations) set forth in claim 1 and 7, and are therefore rejected for the same reasons a indicated above.
Referring to claim 15:
Peng et al disclose (par. 9, 117, 165-166, 179) a non-transitory, machine-readable medium having stored thereon machine-readable instructions executable to cause a system to perform the method steps (operations) set forth in claim 1, and is therefore rejected for the same reasons a indicated above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-6, 9-13, and 16-20 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. Referring to these claims, the prior art searched and of record neither anticipates nor suggests the limitations added in the claimed combinations.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 26 May 2026 was filed in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98. Accordingly, the IDS has been considered by the examiner.
The relevance of the cited documents, in addition to any applied above, can be found in the Office Action mailed 24 May 2025 in Chinese patent application no. 2021-80081631.9 (of record) and the Office Action mailed 02 September 2025 in Japanese patent application no. 2023-533637 (of record).
Cited Art
The prior art and other references made of record and not relied upon are considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Shang et al (US 20210192728) corresponds to CN 111754486 A applied in the Office Action mailed 24 May 2025 in Chinese patent application no. 2021-80081631.9 (of record).
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/Scott A Rogers/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2683
13 June 2026
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