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 .
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of Invention I in the reply filed on April 24th 2026 is acknowledged. Claims 10-20 are withdrawn from further consideration pursuant to 37 CFR 1.142(b) as being drawn to a nonelected invention, there being no allowable generic or linking claim.
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 non-obviousness.
Claims 1-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being obvious over Alexander et al. (US 2023/0116175) in view of Amanatullah et al. (US 2017/0312031).
Regarding claim 1, Alexander et al. disclose a method for medical procedure tracking, comprising: determining a virtual patient model (304) comprising a virtual external patient structure and a virtual internal patient structure (¶[0040]); and during a medical procedure, performed using a set of medical instruments: sampling a timeseries of measurements depicting a patient; registering the virtual patient model with a measurement from the timeseries (¶[0043], [0050]-[0054]), using model features extracted from the virtual external patient structure and alignment features extracted from the measurement; overlaying the virtual patient model over measurements of the timeseries based on the registration (¶[0030]; [0068]-[0070]); generating a set of instrument tracks by tracking a set of medical instruments relative to the virtual internal patient structure throughout the timeseries of measurements (¶[0034], [0057]).
Alexander et al. fail to disclose predicting a future trajectory of the set of medical instruments relative to the internal patient structure based on the set of instrument tracks. Alexander et al. disclose indicating to a surgeon if one or more of the instruments are misaligned with a planned trajectory (¶[0057]).
Amanatullah et al. disclose predicting a future trajectory of a medical instrument relative to an internal patient structure based on an instrument track in order to create a new trajectory to help a surgeon correct a misaligned real trajectory toward a target (¶[0007], [0146]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have applied the cutting trajectory prediction and correction technique of Amanatullah et al. when creating the instrument tracks of Alexander et al. in order to help a surgeon correct a misaligned real cutting trajectory.
Regarding claim 2, the virtual external patient structure and the virtual internal patient structure are generated from the same set of cross-sectional patient scans (¶[0028] of Alexander et al.).
Regarding claim 3, the method further comprises identifying a current step in the medical procedure, wherein the future trajectory is predicted based on the identified current step (evident from ¶[0146] of Amanatullah et al.).
Regarding claim 4, the current step is identified based on the set of instrument tracks (evident from ¶[0146] of Amanatullah et al.).
Regarding claim 5, the method further comprises evaluating whether the timeseries of measurements is relevant to the current step based on the set of instrument tracks, wherein the future trajectory is predicted responsive to the timeseries of measurements being relevant (evident from ¶[0146] of Amanatullah et al. and ¶[0146] of Alexander et al.).
Regarding claim 6, registering the virtual patient model comprises aligning the virtual patient model and each measurement, virtual patient model registration is constrained by an alignment between the model features and the alignment features (¶[0043], [0050]-[0054] of Alexander et al.).
Regarding claim 7, Applicant has not disclosed what benefit ICP provides over other point registration techniques and is just one example of the known point registration techniques that can be used (¶[0078] of the published application). Therefore, it would have been an obvious matter of design choice to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have
used ICP as claimed since Applicant has not disclosed that ICP solves any stated problem or is for any particular purpose and it appears that the invention would perform equally well with other point registration techniques.
Regarding claim 8, generating the set of instrument tracks comprises: detecting medical instruments from the set of medical instruments depicted within each measurement using a set of medical instrument object detectors trained to output a medical instrument detection and a kinematic state of the detected medical instrument; matching the medical instruments across successive measurements; and generating an instrument track for the medical instruments from the matches and the kinematic states (¶[0008] of Alexander et al.).
Regarding claim 9, predicting the future trajectory of the medical tool feature comprises using a prediction model trained on trajectories of medical tool features determined during prior procedures (¶[0008] of Alexander et al.)..
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Thomas McEvoy whose telephone number is (571) 270-5034 and direct fax number is (571) 270-6034. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Friday, 9:00 am – 6:00 pm.
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/THOMAS MCEVOY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3771
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