Ex Parte OrtmaierDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardJun 30, 201713061361 (P.T.A.B. Jun. 30, 2017) Copy Citation 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. 13/061,361 04/11/2011 Tobias Ortmaier FUBO-06 5406 26875 7590 07/05/2017 WOOD, HERRON & EVANS, LLP 2700 CAREW TOWER 441 VINE STREET CINCINNATI, OH 45202 EXAMINER LIN, ABBYYEE ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3664 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 07/05/2017 ELECTRONIC 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. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): usptodock@whe-law.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte TOBIAS ORTMAIER Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 Technology Center 3600 Before JEAN R. HOMERE, MICHAEL M. BARRY, and MICHAEL J. ENGLE, Administrative Patent Judges. BARRY, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellant1 appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from a Final Rejection of claims 12—14, 16—24, and 26. App. Br. 3. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. 1 Appellant identifies the real party in interest as KUKA Roboter GmbH. App. Br. 3. Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 Introduction Appellant describes the invention as relating “to a medical work station and an operating device for the manual movement of a robot arm of a medical work station.” Spec. 1. Claim 12 is representative: 12. A medical operating device, comprising: a first manual input device configured for manual manipulation by a user; a control device communicating with said first input device; said control device generating a first signal in response to manual movement of said first manual input device, said first signal operative to control movement of a first robot arm such that the first robot arm executes a movement corresponding to the manual movement of said first manual input device; an interface associated with said control device and communicating with a hospital data network, said control device communicating with the hospital data network and retrieving data that is stored on the hospital data network and is associated with a living being via said interface; a display communicating with said control device and displaying information associated with the data; and a switching device coupled with said control device; said control device having two operational modes responsive to actuation of said switching device, wherein: in a first mode, said control device generates said first signal in response to the manual movement of said first input device, and in a second mode, said control device retrieves data associated with the living being and changes how information associated with the retrieved data is displayed on said display in response to the manual manipulation of said first manual input device, and makes a change to the stored data that is associated with the 2 Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 information currently displayed on said display in response to the manual manipulation of said first manual input device. App. Br. 14—15 (Claims App’x) (disputed requirements emphasized). Rejections Claims 12—14, 17, 18, and 20-24 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Salisbury et al. (US 2003/0220541 Al, published Nov. 27, 2003 (hereinafter “Salisbury”)) and Graves et al., An Integrated Remote Neurosurgical System, Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference CVRMed-MRCAS (1997) (available at www.cs.cmu.edu/~jtullio/docs/mrcas97.pdf (last accessed June 6, 2017) (hereinafter “Graves”)). Final Act. 6—14. Claims 16 and 26 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over Salisbury, Graves, and Kazi et al., Next Generation Teach Pedants for Industrial Robots, Advances in Human-Robot Interaction Chapter 1, pp. 47-66 (2005) (ISBN 978-3-540-23211-7) (hereinafter “Kazi”). Final Act. 14-15. Claim 19 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over Salisbury, Graves, and Lipow (US 2006/0087746 Al; Apr. 27, 2006). Final Act. 15—16. ANALYSIS The Combined Teachings of Salisbury and Graves In rejecting claim 12, the Examiner finds Salisbury teaches all limitations except for the requirement that the control device “makes a change to the stored data that is associated with the information currently displayed on said display in response to the manual manipulation of said first manual input device.” Final Act. 6—8. The Examiner then finds Graves 3 Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 teaches this requirement, and concludes that it would have been obvious to an ordinarily skilled artisan “to modify Salisbury’s master control devices for each hand, which can switch between controlling robot arms and retrieving/ scaling data/information, with Graves[’] teaching of using a manual control device to edit/annotate images.” Id. at 8—9. Appellant contends the Examiner errs because “the snapshots from the live video feed of Graves are not data that was retrieved after being stored on a hospital data network as required by the claims.” App. Br. 9. “The added annotations [of Graves] would therefore not be changing the data that was retrieved from a hospital data network, as required.” Id. Appellant further contends “the added annotations would not constitute changing the underlying data.” Id. Appellant’s contentions focus on Graves’ disclosure without accounting for the teachings of Salisbury. One cannot show nonobviousness by attacking references individually when the rejection is based on a combination of references. In re Merck & Co. Inc., 800 F.2d 1091, 1097 (Fed. Cir. 1986); see also In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425 (CCPA 1981). As the Examiner answers, and we agree, “Salisbury, and not Graves, was used to address hospital data networks and retrieving data from the hospital network. The only feature Salisbury was missing was changing/editing data in general.” Ans. 4. Appellant replies that the Examiner misapprehends the argument, and that “Appellant asserts that neither Salisbury ’541 nor Graves teaches or suggests changing stored data that was retrieved from a hospital data network.” Reply Br. 2. We note that the relevant inquiry is not whether either Salisbury or Graves teaches the claimed subject matter identified by 4 Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 Appellant. The question is whether the claimed subject matter would have been obvious to an ordinarily skilled artisan in light of the combined teachings of the references. Merck, 800 F.2d at 1097 (holding the cited references must be read, not in isolation, but for what they fairly teach in combination with the prior art as a whole); Keller, 642 F.2d at 425. Appellant specifically contends that saving annotated video obtained from a live feed from a microscope, as disclosed in Graves, does not teach or suggest changing data retrieved from a hospital data network. . . . The snapshots from the live video feed of Graves are not data that was retrieved after being stored on a hospital data network as required by the claims. Reply Br. 3. Appellant’s argument does not persuade us. Graves specifically teaches “[a] ‘snapshot’ facility allows the surgeon to record still images from the microscope camera and store them. . . . [A] history menu of thumbnail images lets the user [e.g., the surgeon] select an older snapshot to display. Annotations made to the images through whiteboarding are saved with the snapshots.” Graves 806. An ordinarily skilled artisan would have understood that the “older snapshots” in Graves were stored prior to retrieval. Final Act. 4—5. As discussed above, the Examiner specifically relies on Salisbury for teaching data stored on the hospital network. In view of the combined teachings of Salisbury and Graves, an ordinarily skilled artisan would have understood that the data stored by Graves may be stored “on a hospital data network.” The ordinarily skilled artisan also would have understood adding annotations in Graves constitutes changing the stored data. As the Examiner finds, and we agree, “adding annotations is more than simply changing how 5 Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 something is displayed; adding annotations adds[ to]/changes the actual information and also correspondingly adds[ to]/changes the data.” Ans. 4. Appellant also contends “[bjecause neither Salisbury ’541 nor Graves teaches or suggests using the master control of Salisbury ’541 to change stored data that was retrieved from a hospital data network, their combination also fails to teach or suggest at least this limitation.” App. Br. 10. This “neither/nor” argument is unpersuasive because it fails to address how or why the Examiner errs in finding the combined teachings of both Salisbury and Graves renders the limitation obvious. See Final Act. 6—9; Ans. 3—6. Information and Data Appellant also argues the Examiner erroneously “considers the terms ‘information’ and ‘data’ to be exchangeable.” App. Br. 10. Appellant contends that, in the Specification and claims, “‘information’ and ‘data’ are used to refer to different things.” Id. at 10-11. We agree with Appellant that the terms information and data as used in claim 12 refer to different things. Any disagreement between Appellant and the Examiner over the relative meanings of the terms information and data is, however, moot, because the Examiner’s rejection maps different items from Salisbury and Graves to the recited “information associated with the data” and to the recited “data” that is retrieved and stored. See Final Act. 6—9; Ans. 5—6 (“Thus, whether or not ‘Data’ is the same as ‘information’ or whether ‘Data’ and ‘information’ as treated as different things, the rejection still applies.”). Conclusion In view of the foregoing, Appellant has not persuaded us of error by the Examiner in the rejection of claim 12. Accordingly, we sustain the 6 Appeal 2016-001234 Application 13/061,361 Examiner’s rejection. In doing so, we adopt the findings and reasons of the Examiner. See Final Act. 6—9; Ans. 3—6. We also sustain the rejection of claims 13, 14, 16—24, and 26, for which Appellant provides no substantive arguments separate from those for claim 12. See 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(i)(iv) DECISION For the above reasons, we affirm the rejection of claims 12—14, lb- 24, and 26. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(l)(iv). AFFIRMED 7 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation