Microsoft’s AI software unit shakes off patent suit
A Delaware court found in favour of the AI company, which Microsoft bought for $16 billion last year.
Nuance Communications, an artificial intelligence (AI) software company which was acquired by Microsoft last year, has beaten a patent infringement suit brought by Texas-based AI Visualize.
On Friday, July 8, District Judge Richard Andrews of the US District Court for the District of Delaware found that all the asserted claims of AI Visualize’s patents were ineligible for patenting and granted Nuance Communications’ motion to dismiss the suit.
Back in October last year, AI Visualize accused Nuance of infringing four patents related to medical imaging inventions.
Medical imaging techniques involve taking a series of 2D scans of parallel, planar cross-sections of an area of a patient’s body. This results in a 3D virtual model of the scanned area contained in a “volume visualisation dataset” (VVD), which can be used to generate visual views of any portion that was scanned.
AI Visualize’s inventions allow users to access 3D or higher dimensional virtual views of a VVD at her own computer over the internet, without having to transmit and/or locally stored the VVD.
"Each of the foregoing claims of the asserted patents is not directed to a mental process, abstract idea, law of nature, or natural phenomenon. Notwithstanding, it is self-evidence that each of the foregoing claims, when viewed as a whole, improves the technology and computer functionality of accessing and viewing medical imaging data,” said the suit at the time.
According to the suit, Nuance’s PowerShare solution, its cloud-based image sharing network which allows users to access, exchange, and view medical imaging anytime and anywhere, infringes the patents.
In last week’s decision, Andrews focused on the Alice test, which describes a two-step process for determining whether a claim contains an “inventive concept” under the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Section 101 requirements for invention.
The court concluded that the representative patent claims were directed to an abstract idea.
"The claim limitations relevant to these supposed improvements are described generically and are themselves either conventional computer functions or abstract ideas implemented using conventional computer functions,” said Andrews.
Turning to step 2 of the Alice test, Andrews addressed each of the three representative claims individually. He found that each of the claims did not recite an “inventive concept sufficient to transform the claimed abstract idea into a patent eligible application”.
The court granted Nuance’s motion to dismiss.
Microsoft bought Nuance Communications in April last year for $16 billion, to boost its cloud-based health products.
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