Appeal No. 2000-0324 Page 5
Application No. 08/763,874
examiner is insufficient to establish a prima facie case of
obviousness with respect to the claims under appeal. 1
The teachings of the applied prior art (i.e., Desai and
Khalil) would not have made it obvious at the time the2
invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the
art to have arrived at the claimed invention. While the
teachings of the applied prior art may have made it obvious to
such an artisan to have replaced Desai's thermistors 531 with
thermocouples to sense the ablation temperature at the
electrode tip of Desai's catheter, we fail to find any
teaching or suggestion in the applied prior art which would
have made it obvious to such an artisan to have located the
1In rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103, the examiner
bears the initial burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness. See In re Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28
USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir. 1993). A prima facie case of
obviousness is established by presenting evidence that would
have led one of ordinary skill in the art to combine the
relevant teachings of the references to arrive at the claimed
invention. See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5 USPQ2d
1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988) and In re Lintner, 458 F.2d 1013,
1016, 173 USPQ 560, 562 (CCPA 1972).
2The teachings of Desai and Khalil are set forth in the
final rejection (pp. 2-3) and in the brief (pp. 8-9).
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