Appeal 2007-1926
Application 10/062,234
what is already known into the field of its monopoly and
diminishes the resources available to skillful men.” Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp.,
340 U.S. 147, 152 [87 USPQ 303] (1950). This is a principal
reason for declining to allow patents for what is obvious. The
combination of familiar elements according to known methods
is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield
predictable results.
KSR Int’l v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1395 (2007).
The Examiner provides a sound reason for combining ultrasound with
x-ray data to produce a composite three-dimensional image: to provide more
information about the tissue (Answer 3). As acknowledged in Nields,
“spatially correlated information [from ultrasound and x-ray] allows for an
enhanced medical diagnosis of a given location of interest within the body
region” (Nields, col. 3, ll. 29-31). Dimensional information improves
“lesion margin visibility” and “early breast cancer detection” (Niklason, col.
6, ll. 10-21). In sum, we agree with the Examiner’s conclusion that the
claimed invention would have been obvious to a person of skill in the art at
the time the application was filed.
Appellants argue that there would have no motivation to have
combined Nields with the secondary references because “Nields itself would
provide a solution to the motivation suggested by the Examiner” (Br. 10).
We do not find this argument persuasive. Appellants have focused on the
Nields disclosure alone, rather than on what the prior art teaches as a whole.
We find it compelling that, as pointed out by the Examiner, Liou teaches that
“it is known to correlate 3D images from various modalities such as CT [x-
ray] and ultrasound” (Answer 3). In other words, the concept of blending
three-dimensional images from different technologies was known to the
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