Ex Parte Li et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Nov 23, 2015

12430348 (P.T.A.B. Nov. 23, 2015)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
12/430,348 04/27/2009 Bo Li CN920070130US1
(163-462)
2959
49267 7590 11/23/2015
TUTUNJIAN & BITETTO, P.C.
425 Broadhollow Road, Suite 302
Melville, NY 11747
EXAMINER
CHNG, JOY POH AI
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
3626
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
11/23/2015 PAPER
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________________

BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
____________________

Ex parte BO LI, XUE QIAO HOU,
HUI-I HSIAO, GANG HU,
and YUE PAN
____________________

Appeal 2013-0027401
Application 12/430,3482
Technology Center 3600
____________________

Before MICHAEL W. KIM, NINA L. MEDLOCK, and
MATTHEW S. MEYERS, Administrative Patent Judges.

MEYERS, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL

STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s final
rejection of claims 1–20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We AFFIRM-IN-PART.

1 Our decision references Appellants’ Appeal Brief (“App. Br.,” filed
August 10, 2012) and Reply Brief (“Reply Br.,” filed December 7, 2012),
the Examiner’s Answer (“Ans.,” mailed October 9, 2012), and Final Office
Action (“Final Act.,” mailed March 26, 2012).
2 Appellants identify International Business Machines Corporation as the
real party in interest. App. Br. 3.
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CLAIMED INVENTION
Appellants’ claimed invention relates generally to “a method and
system for automatically evaluating the quality of a medical record”
(Spec. 1).
Claim 1, reproduced below with added bracketed notations, is
illustrative of the subject matter on appeal:
1. A method for automatically evaluating the quality
of a standard document, the method comprising:
[a] providing a knowledge base of standard facts of
standard documents;
[b] generating temporary facts from said standard
documents;
[c] constructing a query to said knowledge base from said
temporary facts;
[d] executing said query by a reasoning engine; and
[e] determining the quality of said standard document
using a processor to produce an evaluation result based on said
query.

REJECTION
Claims 1–20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable
over Jamieson (US 7,610,192 B1, iss. Oct. 27, 2009) and Zhang
(US 7,260,568 B2, iss. Aug. 21, 2007).

ANALYSIS
Independent claim 1 and dependent claims 2–5 and 11–13
We are not persuaded by Appellants’ argument that the Examiner
erred in rejecting independent claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), because
according to Appellants, a combination of Jamieson and Zhang fails to
disclose or suggest “constructing a query to said knowledge base from said
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temporary facts,” as recited by limitation [c] of claim 1 and “determining the
quality of said standard document using a processor to produce an evaluation
result based on said query,” as recited by limitation [e] of claim 1 (App. Br.
10–12; Reply Br. 5–7). Instead, we agree with the Examiner that Jamieson
discloses the argued features at least at column 8, lines 36–45, column 10,
lines 17–19 and 42–46, column 11, lines 16–24, and column 17, lines 30–32
and 61–65 (Final Act. 4; Ans. 4–6).
Jamieson is directed to a system for coding free text documents (e.g.,
medical records) using semantic analysis (Jamieson, col. 1, ll. 27–29).
Jamieson describes that its system “map[s] the set S of sentences in a corpus
of related documents, to the set M, of unique meanings or propositions in a
knowledge domain to form a semantic knowledge base” (id. at col. 8, ll. 26–
29). Jamieson’s process takes raw text and segments it into headers and
sentences (id. at col. 10, ll. 5–60). Jamieson further describes:
[t]he document is validated against a document type definition
to ensure that the overall structure is codeable. This includes
checking for duplicate headers, more than one sentence per line,
incorrect abbreviations, etc., but may include other rules as
determined for a specific document type. A graphic symbol,
such as green dot, is generated if the document validates
correctly, and a red dot if the document does not validate
correctly, so additional changes in the document can be made
prior to coding.
(Id. at col. 11, ll. 16–24).
Jamieson’s process continues by matching the sentences to semantic
propositions where “each unique sentence in a document collection is
mapped to one or more semantic proposition(s), which represent the
semantic knowledge of a sentence” (id. at col. 11, ll. 25–30). Jamieson
further describes that “[p]ropositions are distinct from the sentences that
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convey them, although they are related. For example, the sentences ‘The
chest x-ray is normal’ and ‘The chest x-ray is within normal limits’ map to
the same proposition or meaning” (id. at col. 8, ll. 35–39).
Appellants argue that Jamieson does not disclose or suggest “a query
constructed from temporary facts;” rather “Jamieson’s validation deals with
such things as ‘spelling or abbreviation errors’” (App. Br. 12; Reply Br. 5–
6). More particularly, Appellants argue that “[t]emporary facts are
generated from documents and characterize what the document contains”
and “the knowledge base of standard facts includes the definitions of
documents and what is ‘expected’ for those documents,” and thus, the
“headers and sentences” in Jamieson cannot be relied upon to disclose
“temporary facts,” as presently claimed (Reply Br. 5; see also App. Br. 11).
However, we agree with the Examiner, at page 5 of the Answer, that it
is reasonable to rely on Jamieson’s disclosure regarding raw text, which are
segmented into headers and sentences, and then validated against a
document type definition, to ensure that the overall structure is codeable
using a relational engine, to disclose “constructing a query to said
knowledge base from said temporary facts,” as recited by limitation [c] of
claim 1 (see id. at col. 10, ll. 5–60, col. 11, ll. 16–24, col. 17, ll. 20–32). In
this regard, the “headers and sentences” in Jamieson are generated from a
document, and characterize what the document contains, and then queried
against its knowledge base, which includes what is expected from the
“headers and sentences” (see e.g., id. at col. 8, ll. 21–51).
To the extent Appellants assert that “temporary facts” should be
interpreted “to mean ‘facts of the n-ary predicates’ which are ‘generated
from relation instances’” (see Reply Br. 5), we find such an argument
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unpersuasive, as it relies on unrecited limitations. See CollegeNet, Inc. v.
ApplyYourself, Inc., 418 F.3d 1225, 1231 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (although the
specification can be examined for proper context of a claim term, limitations
from the specification will not be imported into the claims). Thus,
Appellants’ argument that Jamieson’s validation is related to “spelling or
abbreviation errors” is not persuasive to show Examiner error.
We also are not persuaded of error on the part of the Examiner by
Appellants’ argument that Jamieson fails to disclose or suggest “determining
the quality of said standard document using a processor to produce an
evaluation result based on said query,” as recited by limitation [e] of claim 1
(App. Br. 11–12; Reply Br. 5–6). More particularly, Appellants argue that
“the Examiner’s attempt to relate such a query to a determination of
document quality falls short” because “Jamieson clearly describes the
‘validation’ process as being manually performed by a medical coder” (App.
Br. 12). However, we agree with the Examiner that Jamieson discloses the
argued limitation (Ans. 5; see also Final Act. 4). In this regard, Jamieson
describes that a “medical coder can add annotations to sentences in the
validation window to resolve ambiguous anaphora” (Jamieson col. 11, ll. 3–
4), but also discloses that its system includes both automated and manual
methods and can work in a fully automated mode – albeit, with less
precision (Jamieson col. 17, ll. 51–60).
Appellants further argue that Jamieson fails to disclose or suggest
“determining the quality of said standard document,” as recited by
limitation [e] of claim 1, because Jamieson fails to disclose “the quality of a
[sic] documents, which is indeed understood to be a ‘degree of quality’”
(Reply Br. 6).
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During examination, “claims . . . are to be given their broadest
reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification, and . . . claim
language should be read in light of the specification as it would be
interpreted by one of ordinary skill in the art.” In re Amer. Acad. of Sci.
Tech Ctr., 367 F.3d 1359, 1364 (Fed. Cir. 2004) (citations omitted).
However, limitations appearing in the specification, but not recited in the
claim, will not be read into the claim. See CollegeNet, Inc., 418 F.3d at
1231.
Here, as the Examiner correctly observes, there is nothing in the claim
language that limits or otherwise characterizes the phrase “determining the
quality” to require a “degree of quality” in order to “produce an evaluation
result,” as limitation [e] of claim 1 further recites (Ans. 5). As such, we
agree with the Examiner that the green or red dot in Jamieson, which
indicates whether a document validates, correctly or not, meets the argued
language (Jamieson col. 11, ll. 20–24). Thus, Jamieson discloses
“determining the quality of said standard document using a processor to
produce an evaluation result based on said query,” as recited by limitation
[e] of claim 1.
In view of the foregoing, we sustain the Examiner’s rejection of
independent claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). We also sustain the
Examiner’s rejection of dependent claims 2–5 and 11–13, which are not
argued separately except based on their dependence on independent claim 1
(App. Br. 10–11).

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Dependent claims 6 and 8–10
Claim 6 ultimately depends from independent claim 1, and recites,
inter alia, that “wherein constructing the query comprises: forming a list of
the temporary facts and a list of the standard facts; removing all facts that
are present in both lists; forming a query using remaining standard facts and
negations of remaining temporary facts.”
We are persuaded by Appellants’ arguments that the Examiner erred
in rejecting claim 6 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because the cited portions of
Jamieson fail to disclose the functionality recited in claim 6 (App. Br. 13–
14; see also Reply Br. 6–7). The Examiner cites Figures 1, 3, 4, and 5, as
well as column 11, line 66 to column 12, line 31 and column 13, line 52 to
column 14, line 15, and column 14, lines 40–47 of Jamieson as disclosing
the claimed subject matter (Final Act. 5–6; see also Ans. 7–8). However,
the cited portions relate generally to manual tasks performed by a medical
coder, and as such, we agree with Appellants that none of the cited portions
of Jamieson discloses removing facts that are present in both lists (Reply Br.
7). The Examiner does not rely on Zhang to cure this deficiency.
Therefore, we do not sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 6
under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). For the same reasons, we also do not sustain the
Examiner’s rejection of claims 8–10, which depend from claim 6.

Dependent claim 7
We are not persuaded by Appellants’ argument that the Examiner
erred in rejecting claim 7 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because Jamieson fails to
disclose or suggest “wherein determining the quality of the medical record
comprises: determining whether the medical record to be evaluated is
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incomplete,” as recited by claim 7 (Reply Br. 8; App. Br. 8). Instead, we
agree with the Examiner that Jamieson discloses the argued feature at least
at Figure 11, column 10, lines 17–35, and column 16, lines 48–66 (Final
Act. 6, 11; Ans. 8). In this regard, Jamieson describes that its validation
process “determin[es] whether a document conforms to a document type
definition and/or meets rule based criteria for acceptability” (Jamieson,
col. 10, ll. 17–19). Appellants argue that that Jamieson “makes no attempt
to evaluate the quality of a document as a whole” (Reply Br. 8). However,
we note that Appellants’ Specification describes that its “system can be used
for identifying incomplete statements in the medical record to be evaluated”
(Spec. 11, ll. 25–26), and thus, determines whether the medical record to be
evaluated is incomplete based on individual statements within the record.
As such, we agree with the Examiner that the validation process performed
in Jamieson is within the scope of the broadly recited limitation recited by
claim 7.
Therefore, we sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 7 under 35
U.S.C. § 103(a).

Independent claims 14 and 20 and dependent claims
Appellants argue that independent claims 14 and 20 are allowable for
the same reasons set forth with respect to claim 1 (App. Br. 10–11). We are
not persuaded, for the reasons set forth above, that the Examiner erred in
rejecting claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). Therefore, we sustain the
Examiner’s rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) of independent claims 14 and
20. We also sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claims 15–19, which
depend from claim 14, and are not argued separately.
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DECISION
The Examiner’s rejection of claims 1–5, 7, and 11–20 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) is affirmed.
The Examiner’s rejection of claims 6 and 8–10 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) is reversed.
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv).

AFFIRMED-IN-PART

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