A Putative Inventor’s Remedies to Correct Inventorship on a Patent

Inventorship is a required component of patents issued in the United States, and the penalty for filing a patent with incorrect inventorship is harsh: possible invalidation of the entire patent. This iBrief explores the background on inventorship in the United States patent system, and various remedies such as 35 U.S.C. §116, 35 U.S.C. §256, and interference proceedings in correcting errors in inventorship. This iBrief will then discuss the usefulness of these various remedies to a putative inventor who was left off the inventorship of a patent

The “Commercial Offer for Sale” Standard After Minnesota Mining v. Chemque

The Supreme Court established a two-part test for determining when an invention is on sale under 35 U.S.C. §102(b) in Pfaff v. Wells Electronics, Inc. For the on-sale bar to be triggered, the invention must be ready for patenting and subject of a commercial offer for sale. In Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing v. Chemque, Inc., the Federal Circuit expounded on what constitutes a commercial offer for sale. This iBrief explores what is considered a commercial offer for sale

The “Commercial Offer for Sale” Standard After Minnesota Mining v. Chemque

The Supreme Court established a two-part test for determining when an invention is on sale under 35 U.S.C. §102(b) in Pfaff v. Wells Electronics, Inc. For the on-sale bar to be triggered, the invention must be ready for patenting and subject of a commercial offer for sale. In Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing v. Chemque, Inc., the Federal Circuit expounded on what constitutes a commercial offer for sale. This iBrief explores what is considered a commercial offer for sale

Evaluation of a Deep Learning-Derived Quantitative Retinopathy of Prematurity Severity Scale

Purpose To evaluate the clinical usefulness of a quantitative deep learning-derived vascular severity score for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) by assessing its correlation with clinical ROP diagnosis and by measuring clinician agreement in applying a novel scale. Design Analysis of existing database of posterior pole fundus images and corresponding ophthalmoscopic examinations using 2 methods of assigning a quantitative scale to vascular severity. Participants Images were from clinical examinations of patients in the Imaging and Informatics in ROP Consortium. Four ophthalmologists and 1 study coordinator evaluated vascular severity on a scale from 1 to 9. Methods A quantitative vascular severity score (1–9) was applied to each image using a deep learning algorithm. A database of 499 images was developed for assessment of interobserver agreement. Main Outcome Measures Distribution of deep learning-derived vascular severity scores with the clinical assessment of zone (I, II, or III), stage (0, 1, 2, or 3), and extent (6 clock hours) of stage 3 evaluated using multivariate linear regression and weighted κ values and Pearson correlation coefficients for interobserver agreement on a 1-to-9 vascular severity scale. Results For deep learning analysis, a total of 6344 clinical examinations were analyzed. A higher deep learning-derived vascular severity score was associated with more posterior disease, higher disease stage, and higher extent of stage 3 disease (P < 0.001 for all). For a given ROP stage, the vascular severity score was higher in zone I than zones II or III (P < 0.001). Multivariate regression found zone, stage, and extent all were associated independently with the severity score (P < 0.001 for all). For interobserver agreement, the mean ± standard deviation weighted κ value was 0.67 ± 0.06, and the Pearson correlation coefficient ± standard deviation was 0.88 ± 0.04 on the use of a 1-to-9 vascular severity scale. Conclusions A vascular severity scale for ROP seems feasible for clinical adoption; corresponds with zone, stage, extent of stage 3, and plus disease; and facilitates the use of objective technology such as deep learning to improve the consistency of ROP diagnosis

Correlated evolution of androgen receptor and aromatase revisited

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Oxford University Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution 27 (2010): 2211-2215, doi:10.1093/molbev/msq129.Conserved interactions among proteins or other molecules can provide strong evidence for coevolution across their evolutionary history. Diverse phylogenetic methods have been applied to identify potential coevolutionary relationships. In most cases, these methods minimally require comparisons of orthologous sequences and appropriate controls to separate effects of selection from the overall evolutionary relationships. In vertebrates, androgen receptor (AR) and cytochrome p450 aromatase (CYP19) share an affinity for androgenic steroids, which serve as receptor ligands and enzyme substrates. In a recent study, Tiwary and Li (2009) reported that AR and CYP19 displayed a signature of ancient and conserved interactions throughout all of the Eumetazoa (i.e., cnidarians, protostomes, and deuterostomes). Because these findings conflicted with a number of previous studies, we reanalyzed the data set used by Tiwary and Li. First, our analyses demonstrate that the invertebrate genes used in the previous analysis are not orthologous sequences, but instead represent a diverse set of nuclear receptors and cytochrome p450 enzymes with no confirmed or hypothesized relationships with androgens. Second, we show that (1) their analytical approach, which measures correlations in evolutionary distances between proteins, potentially led to spurious significant relationships due simply to conserved domains and (2) control comparisons provide positive evidence for a strong influence of evolutionary history. We discuss how corrections to this method and analysis of key taxa (e.g., duplications in the teleost fish and suiform lineages) can inform investigations of the coevolutionary relationships between androgen receptor and aromatase.AMR was supported by the Postdoctoral Scholar Program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with funding provided by The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, and AMT was supported by WHOI Assistant Scientist Endowed Support

Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Using 802.11 Based Media Access for Sink Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

The next generation surveillance and multimedia systems will become increasingly deployed as wireless sensor networks in order to monitor parks, public places and for business usage. The convergence of data and telecommunication over IP-based networks has paved the way for wireless networks. Functions are becoming more intertwined by the compelling force of innovation and technology. For example, many closed-circuit TV premises surveillance systems now rely on transmitting their images and data over IP networks instead of standalone video circuits. These systems will increase their reliability in the future on wireless networks and on IEEE 802.11 networks. However, due to limited non-overlapping channels, delay, and congestion there will be problems at sink nodes. In this paper we provide necessary conditions to verify the feasibility of round robin technique in these networks at the sink nodes by using a technique to regulate multi-radio multichannel assignment. We demonstrate through simulations that dynamic channel assignment scheme using multi-radio, and multichannel configuration at a single sink node can perform close to optimal on the average while multiple sink node assignment also performs well. The methods proposed in this paper can be a valuable tool for network designers in planning network deployment and for optimizing different performance objectives