Appeal No. 1997-3223
Application 08/228,050
Finally, we note that the examiner admits at the bottom
of page 8 of the answer, that the Figure 9 in column 11
reference does not explicitly state anything relating to the
claimed medial axis. The examiner further goes on to urge
again that the use of such a axis would have been obvious to
the artisan. We do not agree. The examiner's position
appears to read more into the teachings and suggestions and
inferences that the artisan would have derived from the noted
teachings in Tuy than we are willing to agree with from an
artisan's perspective.
The other two patents to Weng and Arnold do not provide
evidence of the claimed medial axis either. The examiner
relies upon these references, as noted at page 8 of the
answer, to provide evidence that it would have been obvious to
automate the operation of specifying a location of the feature
in a 3-D data set when the manual operation is known in the
art. Again, the threshold question relating to the medial
axis is not reasonably taught or suggested at all in Weng. On
the other hand, Arnold teaches that the centers of reference
sample images may be determined according to his teachings,
but the relevance of this to the claimed invention has not
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