Appeal No. 2005-1234 Page 6
Application No. 09/749,752
detecting the management information attached to the test piece” in light of the
corresponding structure, material, or acts described by the specification, as well
as equivalents thereof. Moreover, as the determination of function, as well as the
determination of the corresponding structure disclosed in the specification are
issues of claim construction and thus questions of law, see Chiuminatta Concrete
Concepts Inc. v. Cardinal Industries Inc., 145 F.3d 1303, 1307,
46 USPQ2d 1752, 1755-56 (Fed. Cir. 1998), we are not bound by the claim
construction of the examiner.
The claim limitation at issue therefore requires the structure to perform two
functions, the first being obtaining information concerning the positions of the
probes to which the target substance has bound, and the second being
simultaneously detecting the management information attached to the test piece.
Looking to the specification, we find that the structure required by the
specification is a “stimulable phosphor sheet.”1 See, e.g., Specification, page
20. Thus, the specification teaches at page 23, “[a]ccordingly, the ID information
stored on the stimulable phosphor sheet 30 may be detected concurrently with
the information concerning the positions of the hybridized probes stored on the
same stimulable phosphor sheet,” and also teaches that “[m]oreover, in the
above embodiment, the ID information and the information concerning the
positions of the hybridized probes can be detected simultaneously requiring no
1 At oral argument, counsel for appellants’ appeared to agree that was the structure that met the
two limitations disclosed by the specification.
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