CAFC Precedential Decision on Rule 12(b)(6) Affirms Patent Ineligibility of Medical Scan Visualization Claims

The U.S. Court docket of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision choice authored by Decide Reyna in the present day affirming a district courtroom’s grant of a Rule 12(b)(6) movement alleging that AI Visualize’s patent claims have been ineligible below Part 101.

AI Visualize owns U.S. Patent Nos. 8,701,167 (’167 patent), 9,106,609 (’609 patent), 9,438,667 (’667 patent), and 10,930,397 (’397 patent), which all relate to visualization of medical scans. AI Visualize sued Nuance Communications, Inc. and Mach7 Applied sciences, Inc. for patent infringement. Nuance filed a movement to dismiss for failure to state a declare, arguing the claims have been directed to patent ineligible subject material. Since AI Visualize’s Amended Grievance offered no additional details about the eligibility of the claims and neither get together requested for declare building, the district courtroom reviewed the eligibility of the claims and concluded they have been all ineligible.

At Alice the first step, the courtroom discovered the claims have been directed to the summary thought of “retrieving user-requested, remotely saved data.” At step two, the courtroom mentioned the creative element of Declare 1, which is “the flexibility to acquire digital views of a [“volume visualization dataset”] VVD over a low bandwidth, excessive latency community,” was solely obvious in a single limitation and that limitation was “claimed functionally, at a excessive stage of generality,” and thus failed to save lots of the claims from abstraction.

In its evaluation, the CAFC agreed that the claims have been summary at the first step, explaining that the related claims “recite a system that features the functionally-oriented steps of: storing information (VVD) on a server, accepting person requests to view a portion of that information (digital views), checking for the situation of all information wanted for the digital view, “creating” picture frames from any non-locally-stored digital view information, transmitting all non-locally-stored picture frames to the person, compiling all picture frames, and sequentially displaying the picture frames to the person.” This quantities to changing information after which utilizing computer systems to gather and show the info, mentioned the CAFC.

AI Visualize argued the claims “require the creation of ‘on the fly’ digital views at a consumer pc,” and are subsequently not summary. Citing to Hawk Tech. Sys., LLC v. Castle Retail, LLC, 60 F.4th 1349 (Fed. Cir. 2023) for help, the courtroom mentioned the claims merely create a digital view from the prevailing VVD, amounting to summary information manipulation.

Hawk Know-how Programs was a precedential 2023 CAFC holding during which the courtroom affirmed a district courtroom’s holding that Hawk’s patent infringement case relating to its patent for a “high-quality, diminished information fee streaming video product and monitoring system” needs to be dismissed below Rule 12(b)(6) for ineligibility below Part 101.

Though AI Visualize pointed to a number of passages from the specification to help its view that “creation” of digital views offers a technical resolution to a technical drawback, the CAFC mentioned it refuses “to import particulars from the specification if these particulars are themselves not claimed.”

As to Alice step two, AI Visualize argued that the creation of digital views and the creation of digital views on demand or in actual time transforms the claims into “considerably extra” than the summary thought. Citing to Affinity Labs of Tex., LLC v. DIRECTV, LLC, 838 F.3d 1253, 1257 (Fed. Cir. 2016) and Elec. Power Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2016), the CAFC concluded that AI Visualize had “not made enough factual allegations to help that the claims contain unconventional know-how or a concrete utility of the summary thought of digital view ‘creation.’” The district courtroom’s Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal was thus affirmed.