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 .
Priority
Applicant’s claim for the benefit of a prior-filed application under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) or under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) is acknowledged.
Claim Objections
Claim 1 is objected to because of the following informalities: the limitation “identifies a set of specialists based on based on the suspected pathology” contains a duplicate phrase “based on”. For the purpose of further examination, the limitation has been interpreted as “identifies a set of specialists based on the suspected pathology.” 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.
Claim 3 is 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 applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 3 recites the limitation “the threshold.” There is no antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. For the purpose of further examination, claim 3 has been interpreted as dependent on claim 2.
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, 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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 1, 4, and 6-12 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mandawat et al. (US 2021/0183500 A1), in view of Adiri et al. (US 2020/0126227 A1), hereinafter referred to as Mandawat and Adiri, respectively.
Regarding claim 1, Mandawat teaches a system for computer-aided detection and decision-making associated with a suspected pathology, the system comprising:
a computing subsystem (Mandawat Figs. 4 & 11), wherein the computing subsystem:
receives a set of images associated with a patient (Mandawat Fig. 6: 602; Mandawat ¶¶0076: “At block 602, method 600 includes receiving medical image data from an image sharing application running on a sharing device”);
process the set of images with a set of trained models to automatically identify the suspected pathology (Mandawat Fig. 6: 608; Mandawat ¶¶0042: “the model may be trained to learn how to use image recognition to make clinical decisions that would align with those made by a human doctor”; Mandawat ¶¶0079: “the relevant medical condition to be diagnosed may be determined by the server by processing the medical image data”);
identifies a set of specialists Mandawat Fig. 6: 612; Mandawat ¶¶0081: “At block 612, method 600 includes, in response to receiving the signal, transmitting an activation signal to each member user device of a medical team associated with the viewing device. Each member user device may be identified as belonging to a team member on a medical team of doctors on call to handle the medical condition confirmed based on the medical image data”); and
transmits, to each application of a set of applications, a notification and a set of images (Mandawat ¶¶0048: “Sharing device 102 may transmit medical image data 108 to server 104 via a wireless connection or a different type of connection … medical image data 108 may be inaccessible by sharing device 102 after the medical image data 108 is transmitted to server 104”; Mandawat ¶¶0065: “the server 104 may be configured to responsively transmit a message to the sharing device 102 to request additional image data from the sharing device 102”); and
the set of applications, each application executing on a mobile device associated with a specialist in the set of specialists, wherein each application is configured to display the notification (Mandawat Fig. 6: 612; Mandawat ¶¶0081: “The activation signal sent to each member user device may require closed-loop acknowledgement by each member user device that activation has occurred. If each team member does not confirm receipt of the activation signal, the server may send reminders or take other remedial actions to ensure that the team is activated to handle the patient. In further examples, one or more activation signals may be sent to other types of computing devices as well or instead of user devices”), wherein each application comprises:
a viewer displaying the set of images (Mandawat Fig. 8A-G); and
a messaging center configured to transmit messages between specialists in the set of specialists (Mandawat Fig. 8A-G & ¶¶0081 discussed above).
However, Mandawat does not appear to explicitly teach that the images are compressed.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Adiri teaches that the images are compressed (Adiri Fig. 3 & ¶¶0060: “The image data transmitted to image analysis unit 140 may include image 130, a cropped image with examined object 134, a processed version of image 130 (e.g., one where the color of at least part of the pixels of image 130 was corrected based on colorized surface 132), or data derived from image 130”; Adiri ¶¶0261: “Image-related data may also include geographic information, weather information, pixel information, camera or image sensor information, an analysis of the image or a portion thereof, compression data, data related to transmitting the image, or any other data or information related to the medical image or capturing of the medical image”).
Mandawat and Adiri are considered to be analogous art because they are directed to medical image sharing. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the smartphone application for medical image data sharing and team activation (as taught by Mandawat) to transmit compressed images (as taught by Adiri) because the combination can include additional information, e.g., region of interest, color annotation, image correction, while reducing the sizes the images at the same time (Adiri ¶¶0060).
Regarding claim 4, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, further comprising a diagnostic viewing system configured to:
display the set of images (Mandawat Fig. 8A-G); and
receive an input from a diagnostic specialist, the input comprising a confirmation of the suspected pathology, wherein the computing subsystem transmits the notification in response to receiving the input (Mandawat Abstract: “The method additionally includes transmitting, to the viewing device, a request for confirmation of a medical condition associated with the category of medical information … The method further includes receiving, from the viewing device, a signal confirming the medical condition based on the medical image data. The method also includes in response to receiving the signal, transmitting an activation signal to each member user device of a medical team associated with the viewing device.”).
Regarding claim 6, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the notification is concurrently transmitted to each application in the set of applications (Mandawat Figs. 4-5).
Regarding claim 7, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, wherein each application monitors for an input from the specialist associated with the application and performs an action in response to receiving the input (Mandawat Abstract discussed above; Mandawat ¶¶0067: “Each activation signal may separately require a team member to confirm receipt of their respective activation signal in order to indicate that they are fulfilling their role in preparing to treat patient with the identified medical condition”).
Regarding claim 8, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 7, wherein the input comprises a read receipt (Mandawat Abstract & ¶¶0067 discussed above; Mandawat ¶¶0104: “In FIG. 9, a circular dot indicates that EKG 904 has been read or addressed by the hospital user, while EKG 906 has not been viewed or addressed.”).
Regarding claim 9, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 7, wherein the input comprises a request to initiate a transfer of the patient (Mandawat ¶¶0028: “Example embodiments also have applications in the area of hospital transfer. When transferring a patient from a clinic or urgent care to an emergency room or from a hospital to a hospital at a higher level of care, a legal requirement exists under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to provide information and documentation relevant to the patient's care to the receiving institution”; Mandawat ¶¶0040: “Patient release and signature functionality may also be built into the application to allow for the transfer of medical records”).
Regarding claim 10, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 7, wherein the input comprises an acceptance to treat of the patient (Mandawat ¶¶0037: “The activation signals may require closed-loop acknowledgement by each team member to confirm that they have received the message and will perform their respective tasks to prepare to treat a patient (e.g., prepare a cath lab for a STEMI)”).
Regarding claim 11, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the compressed set of images comprises a subset of the first set of images (Mandawat ¶¶0038: “Bounding boxes and/or cropping may be used to allow a user to customize images before sharing. Image processing may be performed to facilitate customization of shared images. Overlaid boxes that black out certain areas of an image (e.g., name, birthday) may be suggested to a user. The suggested portions of an image to share or block out may be subject to user override”).
Regarding claim 12, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the viewer displays annotations comprising a measurement for the suspected pathology (Mandawat ¶¶0038 discussed above; Mandawat ¶¶0049: “An indication of the portions of the medical image data 108 to include or exclude when sharing the image data may be stored by server 104 in medical image database 106”; Adiri ¶¶0079: “system 100 may provide two dimensional measurements of different sections of skin feature 400 associated with a same color, such as size and shape characteristics (symmetry, boundary length etc.)”; Adiri ¶¶0217: “Such training examples may include an image of a wound with a colorized surface together with an indicator of a measurement of the wound and/or of a particular portion of the wound, a portion of an image, color information associated with an image, and/or any other data capable of training a machine to estimate the length, size, depth, and/or volume of a skin feature”).
Claim(s) 2 and 3 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mandawat et al. (US 2021/0183500 A1), in view of Adiri et al. (US 2020/0126227 A1), and further in view of Nistal et al. (US 2022/0214359 A1), hereinafter referred to as Mandawat, Adiri, and Nistal, respectively.
Regarding claim 2, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 1, but does not appear to explicitly teach that the suspected pathology is a suspected aneurysm with a diameter greater than a threshold.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Nistal teaches that the suspected pathology is a suspected aneurysm with a diameter greater than a threshold (Nistal ¶¶0045: “improved early detection of unruptured aneurysms could enhance the triage of patients presenting with symptoms concerning for aneurysm formation and growth, and could also reduce our reliance on neuroimaging for aneurysm monitoring”; Nistal ¶¶0111: “medical therapy is performed where the risk of preventive repair such as surgery outweighs the risk of rupture, e.g., where the size of the IA is small (e.g., 5 mm or less in diameter)” – IAs larger than 5mm are at risk of rupture).
Mandawat, in view of Adiri, and Nistal are considered to be analogous art because they are directed to medical diagnosis. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the smartphone application for medical image data sharing and team activation (as taught by Mandawat, in view of Adiri) to compare the suspected aneurysm with a threshold (as taught by Nistal) because the combination allows determining which aneurysms are safe to treat vs. at risk of rupture (Nistal ¶¶0111).
Regarding claim 3, Mandawat, in view of Adiri and Nistal, teaches the system of claim [[1]] 2, wherein the threshold is 5 mm (Nistal ¶¶0111 discussed above).
Claim(s) 5 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mandawat et al. (US 2021/0183500 A1), in view of Adiri et al. (US 2020/0126227 A1), and further in view of Bar-Aviv et al. (US 2009/0028403 A1), hereinafter referred to as Mandawat, Adiri, and Bar-Aviv, respectively.
Regarding claim 5, Mandawat, in view of Adiri, teaches the system of claim 4, but does not appear to explicitly teach that the patient is in a queue of patients, wherein the diagnostic viewing system is configured to display a set of images for each patient in the queue, wherein the queue is prioritized based on a suspected pathology, identified at the computing system, for each patient in the queue.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Bar-Aviv teaches that the patient is in a queue of patients, wherein the diagnostic viewing system is configured to display a set of images for each patient in the queue, wherein the queue is prioritized based on a suspected pathology, identified at the computing system, for each patient in the queue (Bar-Aviv ¶¶0143: “The present embodiments comprise a real-time autonomous prioritization and alerting system for 3D medical images … the system gives the 3D medical image a priority-level that indicates the urgency of the case … allowing the radiologist to diagnose critical cases first. In addition, the system enhances the radiologists' throughput in two or more levels. First, the system extracts high-probability normal cases from the queue of pending 3D medical images, allowing radiologists review pending 3D medical images that have been estimated as pathological first”).
Mandawat, in view of Adiri, and Bar-Aviv are considered to be analogous art because they are directed to medical diagnosis. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the smartphone application for medical image data sharing and team activation (as taught by Mandawat, in view of Adiri) to prioritize the queue (as taught by Bar-Aviv) because the combination allows the clinicians to diagnose critical cases first (Bar-Aviv ¶¶0143).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 13-20 are allowed.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Regarding claim 13, the prior art of record (Mandawat, in view of Adiri, Nistal and Bar-Aviv) teaches that it was known at the time the application was filed to use a method for computer-aided detection and decision-making associated with a suspected pathology, the method comprising:
receiving a set of images associated with a patient (Mandawat Fig. 6: 602; Mandawat ¶¶0076: “At block 602, method 600 includes receiving medical image data from an image sharing application running on a sharing device”);
processing the set of images with a set of trained models to automatically identify a set of suspected pathology (Mandawat Fig. 6: 608; Mandawat ¶¶0042: “the model may be trained to learn how to use image recognition to make clinical decisions that would align with those made by a human doctor”; Mandawat ¶¶0079: “the relevant medical condition to be diagnosed may be determined by the server by processing the medical image data”); and
for each suspected pathology in the set of suspected pathologies:
annotating the set of images (Mandawat ¶¶0038: “Bounding boxes and/or cropping may be used to allow a user to customize images before sharing. Image processing may be performed to facilitate customization of shared images. Overlaid boxes that black out certain areas of an image (e.g., name, birthday) may be suggested to a user. The suggested portions of an image to share or block out may be subject to user override”; Mandawat ¶¶0049: “An indication of the portions of the medical image data 108 to include or exclude when sharing the image data may be stored by server 104 in medical image database 106”).
The prior art further teaches that the suspected pathology is an aneurysm and for each suspected aneurysm in the set of suspected aneurysms: determining a set of measurements for the suspected aneurysm; and annotating the set of images, comprising annotating a region of the set of images based on a size threshold and the set of measurements of the suspected aneurysm (Nistal Abstract: “obtaining a test dataset comprising a plurality of abundance measures”; Nistal ¶¶0045: “improved early detection of unruptured aneurysms could enhance the triage of patients presenting with symptoms concerning for aneurysm formation and growth, and could also reduce our reliance on neuroimaging for aneurysm monitoring”; Nistal ¶¶0095-¶¶0096: “the trained classifier provides an indication that the subject has an intracranial aneurysm, where the indication comprises a first diagnostic status (e.g., a presence or absence of IA) and a second diagnostic status (e.g., a size of an IA, a location of an IA, a presence or absence of aneurysmal rupture, a saccular aneurysm, an endovascular treatment status for an IA, and/or an open treatment status for an IA) … the indication from the trained classifier that a subject has an intracranial aneurysm further comprises 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, or more than 10 additional indications, where each additional indication corresponds to a respective additional diagnostic status (e.g., a size of an IA, a location of an IA, a presence or absence of aneurysmal rupture, a saccular aneurysm, an endovascular treatment status for an IA, and/or an open treatment status for an IA) in addition to the first diagnostic status (e.g., a presence or absence of IA)”; Nistal ¶¶0111: “medical therapy is performed where the risk of preventive repair such as surgery outweighs the risk of rupture, e.g., where the size of the IA is small (e.g., 5 mm or less in diameter)” – IAs larger than 5mm are at risk of rupture).
However, the prior art, alone or in combination, does not appear to teach or suggest coloring a region of the set of images based on a size threshold, the set of measurements, and a location of the suspected aneurysm (coloring based on all of the listed parameters).
Claims 14-20 depend from claim 13 and therefore are allowed for the same reason as claim 13 discussed above.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to SOO J SHIN whose telephone number is (571)272-9753. The examiner can normally be reached M-F; 10-6.
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/Soo Shin/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2667 572-272-9753
soo.shin@uspto.gov