Appeal No. 2001-0575
Application 08/924,867
OPINION
With regard to the independent claim, the examiner provides Fisher as a general teaching
of a PACS system, but admits that Fisher does “not disclose either authenticating the images,
securing the transmission of the images through encryption, data compression, or image datasets
comprising an image header and image data” [answer-page 4]. The examiner then turns to
Dyson for a teaching of storing a pre-computed hash (the first identifier, at column 3, lines
36-42) locally on a computer, acknowledging the advantage of broadcasting a file from separate
storage locations across the communication network to many computers simultaneously, at
column 2, lines 46-56. The examiner then spends pages 5-7 of the answer, delineating the many
failures of Dyson and conjecturing on why so many of the missing claim limitations would have
been obvious to the artisan and how and why the combination of Fisher/Dyson would have
allowed for secured transmission through encryption and authentication of medical images in the
form of image datasets and would have provided certain benefits, without any specific evidence
to support those allegations.
Clearly, the examiner has not established a prima facie case of obviousness with regard to
the instant claimed subject matter.
While the following is not meant to be an exhaustive list of deficiencies in the examiner’s
case, it will suffice to show some of the errors in the examiner’s reasoning:
Claim 1 calls for an “image archive server” and recites how it is functionally intertwined
with other claimed elements. The examiner appears to agree that the applied references fail to
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