Browsing all articles from December, 2009

Acuo seems to be claiming a patent on DICOM forwarding!

Posted Posted by Martin P in PACS General     Comments No comments
Dec
8

A press release from Acuo announces the approval of a US patent for an “Asset Communication Format within a Computer Network”.  Although it leaves room for future expansion, it is primarily focused on the Medical Imaging technology sector.

Not being based in the US, I had no qualms about taking a look and although I am very definitely not a lawyer, my reading of the full text (thanks to Damian) suggests that the scope of the patent covers 3 aspects of Medical Imaging Communication:

  1. Bandwidth throttling.  Now it strikes me that isn’t exactly novel – even in 2001 when the patent was originally applied for.
  2. Distributed archiving.  Having a number of independent ‘silos’ with one central consolidation point.  Images could be in multiple archives (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Archives?) Hmm don’t know if that’s necessarily innovative but I guess if one accepts the premise of software patents (the US version), one could see that as ok.
  3. Fowarding engine rules based on AE Title and DICOM tags.

Now the 3rd one is just plain silly.  If the USPTO could find prior art for that, then quite simply, they didn’t look nearly hard enough.

Still, we hear about ridiculous patents on a regular basis.  Just one of many.  Just one of many. Sigh