Appeal No. 1997-1655
Application 07/797,893
appeal. For the reasons which follow, we will reverse the decision of the examiner rejecting claims 13
to 20 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Appellants argue (Brief, pages 6 to 8) that Crawford ‘148 and Robb fail to teach or suggest the
recited feature of displaying a three-dimensional image using a region extracting process which
automatically performs extraction and expansion steps on voxel data, wherein the processed image is
displayed "in a realtime manner simultaneously with repetitions of said expansion substep" (claim 13 on
appeal, last paragraph). We agree, and we find that the feature
recited in claims 13 to 20 on appeal, of executing "automatic repetitions" of an "expansion substep"
while displaying an image "in a realtime manner" during or simultaneously with the repetitions of the
expansion substep (independent claims 13 and 16), is neither taught nor would have been suggested by
the applied prior art. By displaying images in a realtime manner during the expansion substep, the
method of claim 13 is able to monitor the sequential change of extracted regions after each repetition of
the expansion substep, thereby monitoring the expansion process and overcoming the disadvantage of
the prior art (Brief, page 7).
We are in agreement with appellants (Brief, page 8) that the "on the fly" language of Robb (see
Robb, page 221, column 2) fails to teach or suggest the salient feature of claims 13 to 20 as discussed
above. Specifically, we find that Robb’s "on the fly" voxel operation occurs "during the projection
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