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 § 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.
Claim(s) 1, 10, 11, and 20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over U. S. Publication No. 2022/0344034 to Roundhill et al. in view of U. S. Publication No. 2017/0120080 to Phillips et al.
Regarding Claims 1 and 11, Roundhill teaches a control method and system of an ultrasonic diagnostic device, which comprises a display configured to display an ultrasonic image corresponding to a scan area scanned by a probe, including: identifying an object included in the scan area; determining a diagnostic subject based on at least one of the object or a user input received from an input interface (para 038-042 teaches identifying an object in a scan area); determining a scannable time for each object or diagnostic subject (para 046-050 teaches a scannable time for each diagnostic object).
Does not expressly teach and displaying an indicator for displaying the scannable time on the display.
Phillips teaches displaying an indicator for displaying the scannable time on the display (figs. 4 and 6 elements 430 and 634 teaches an indicator showing how much time is left).
It would be obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of filing to modify with an indicator for displaying the scannable time on the display as taught by Phillips, since such a setup would result in an easy determination by the operator for determining how much time is left.
Regarding Claims 10 and 20, Roundhill teaches identifying of the object included in the scan area includes being performed by a machine learning model stored in a memory (para 041 and 042 teaches a machine learning model for identifying an object included in a scan area).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-9 and 12-19 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.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: the closest prior art of record are U. S. Publication No. 2022/0344034 to Roundhill et al.; U. S. Publication No. 2017/0120080 to Philips et al.; U. S. Publication No. 2017/0086783 to Stefan et al.; and U. S. Publication No. 2022/0087644 to Patil et al. none of the prior art alone or in combination teaches “displaying a first sub-indicator displaying information about the object or the diagnostic subject; displaying a second sub-indicator displaying information about a time at which a scan for the object or the diagnostic subject has been performed; and displaying a third sub-indicator displaying information about a remaining scannable time for the object or the diagnostic subject, and wherein the combination of the second sub-indicator and the third sub-indicator displays the maximum scannable time for each object or diagnostic subject”.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to SANJAY CATTUNGAL whose telephone number is (571)272-1306. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9-5 EST.
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/SANJAY CATTUNGAL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3798