Appeal No. 2000-0583
Application No. 08/955,984
only to the extent that it changes the moisture content of the
tubing or of the final balloon. In this regard, we note that
one of ordinary skill in appellants’ art at the time of
appellants’ invention, as evidenced by the discussion of the
level of skill in the art in the paragraph bridging pages 6
and 7 of appellants’ specification, would have considered the
moisture content of the tubing at the time it was subjected to
the expansion step to be an important parameter, not the
actual presence or absence of a drying step at a particular
point in the fabrication process. Thus, in our opinion, the
Levy balloon reasonably appears to be the same as a balloon
made, for example, by a method including the steps of
extruding a hollow tube of thermoplastic material (e.g., PET),
having a higher initial moisture content than the PET from
which Levy’s tubing is extruded, drying the tube to the same
moisture content as Levy’s tubing and expanding the tube by
subjecting the tube to elevated temperature and interior
pressure. Also, keeping in mind that claim 1 does not
preclude a step of storing the extruded tube in a humid
environment for some period of time prior to expanding it, we
observe that Levy’s balloon would appear to be the same as a
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