Appeal No. 2004-0823
Application No. 09/555,391
decompression of Novik to these images. Finally, appellants argue that the proposed
combination makes no sense because the references teach away from each other [brief, pages 10-
15].
The examiner responds that Ohhashi provides for a dynamic range processed medical
image that can be processed with the invention of Novik. The examiner otherwise disagrees
with each of appellants’ argument in the brief [answer, pages 10-14].
Appellants respond that the final image in Novik is loss-less and does not result from a
lossy compression method as claimed. Appellants also respond that Ohhashi does not compress
images, but instead, changes the windowing parameters to produce a new image, not a set of
compressed data. Thus, appellants assert that the combination makes no sense because Ohhashi
does not compress or decompress data whereas Novik does both [reply brief, pages 3-9].
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of independent claims 1, 19 and 23 based on
Ohhashi and Novik for essentially the reasons argued by appellants in the briefs. We primarily
agree with appellants’ argument that there is no legitimate basis for applying the decompression
scheme of Novik to the Ohhashi data. Ohhashi relates to selecting a conversion factor for image
data related to the display window. This conversion factor has nothing to do with compression
schemes for transmitting image data. Since Ohhashi has nothing to do with compression and
decompression schemes for image data transmission, we see no motivation for the artisan to
apply a lossy compression method to the data of Ohhashi such that a decompressed image will
have substantially a desired image quality. There is no loss of image quality that needs to be
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