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 Interpretation
Claims 1-13 are not interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, because they are all method claims.
Claim Objections
Claims 3, 7 and 10 are objected to because of the following informalities:
The extraneous text in each of these claim ought to be deleted: the “(1)” in claim 3, “(2)” and “(3)” in claim 7, and “(4)” in claim 10. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention.
Claim 1 recites the limitation “the received deformation field” in line 8 and “the deep neural network” in line 6. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim. Likewise, claims 2-13 depend on claim 1 and thus are rejected for the same reasons as well.
Claim 2 recites the limitation “the intensity” in line 2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. Likewise, claims 3 and 7-13 depend on claim 2 and thus are rejected for the same reasons as well.
Claim 3 lacks clarity because (i)it does not define what “argmin E” is referred to; (ii)the function does not include an equation sign; and (iii)it does not define what “E” is referred to.
Claim 12 recites the term “omega” and does not limit it to be non-zero. When it is zero, the term “1/|omega| I”s indefinite.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-13 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Regarding claim 1 as a representative claim, the cited prior art does not teach or suggest claim limitations “generating a surrogate image by using the source image, the target image and random continuous uniform distribution; obtaining a total loss function by using the first registration result, the second registration result and the surrogate image, and inputting the total loss function into the deep neural network model to calculate the gradient of the total loss function with respect to the parameters of the deep neural network model, and adjusting the parameters of the deep neural network model by means of minimizing the total loss; and repeating the above steps until a predetermined number of iterations is achieved, so as to obtain the final deep neural network model”.
Claims 2-13 depend on claim 1 and thus are allowable for the same reasons as well.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Neumann et al. (U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2015/0242589 A1) teaches a method and system for estimating tissue parameters of a computational model (abstract, fig. 1)
Liao et al. (U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2017/0337682 A1) teaches methods and systems for image registration using AI (abstract, figures 2-3).
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2/2026
/DUY M DANG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2662