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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 29 2013 @ 01:27 PM EDT |
Thankfully, in Abele, the USPTO Board of Appeals was paying attention to the
Supremes.
The USPTO Appeals Board tied those instructions into the
physical aspect of the device. From the ruling:
36. Computed
tomography apparatus comprising:
means for measuring the values of the
line integrals of an incoherent propagation along a plurality of paths through a
region of interest in a body;
calculating means, connnected to receive
the values of said integrals from said means for measuring and to calculate, at
each of a number of reconstruction points in said region of interest, the
difference between the local value of a characteristic at said point and the
average value of said characteristics in a local region surrounding said point;
and
means for reconstructing a representation of features in said
region which function to receive said calculated values from said calculating
means and to display the calculated value for each reconstruction point at a
point in a picture which corresponds to said reconstruction
point.
And the Court's examination:
Indeed, the step of
“measuring * * * line integrals of an incoherent propagation * * * through * * *
a body” explicitly requires the same steps implicit in claim 6, viz.,
production of a beam and detection of the beam after it is
attenuated by passing through a body.
Asterisk highlighting
in the original ruling. Bolding mine. That dreaded physical component
again.
Without the physical my humble conclusion is that they would have
failed equally to claims 5 and 7 as well.
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