Appeal No. 96-2043
Application 07/990,514
laser pulses of "about 200 nanoseconds" and a technique for
producing such pulses. It is the examiner's position that it
would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the
art at the time of appellant's invention to employ an XeCl
Excimer laser operating at a wavelength of about 308 nm and
density of at least 50 mJ/mm as suggested by L'Esperance and2
Davies, a fiber-optic waveguide as taught by Guerder, and a
pulse stacking technique as taught by Seppala to produce
pulses of greater than 200 nsec in the angioplasty device
taught by Hussein. See, Answer, pages 2 and 3.
The appellant attacks the rejection on the basis that
none of the applied references teach the combination of
features set forth in the claims (Brief, pages 5-8). In
addition, appellant argues that the examiner's rejections are
based on impermissible hindsight (Brief, pages 9-11).
Our review of Seppala reveals that Seppala teaches a
method and apparatus for the production of a high power laser
beam of short, controllable temporal duration while avoiding
optical damage to any of the optical elements of the laser
system (col. 1, lines 39-46). The method disclosed by Seppala
comprises the
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