International Business Machines Corporation

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

Jan 21, 2022

2021001008 (P.T.A.B. Jan. 21, 2022)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 15/833,044 12/06/2017 Francisco P. Curbera SVL920160237US02 4716 45725 7590 01/21/2022 Walder Intellectual Property Law PC 445 Crestover Circle Richardson, TX 75080 EXAMINER SENSENIG, SHAUN D ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3629 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 01/21/2022 PAPER Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte FRANCISCO P. CURBERA, SHILPA N. MAHATMA, YAJUAN WANG, ROSE M. WILLIAMS, and GIGI Y.C. YUEN-REED Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 Technology Center 3600 ____________ Before JAMES P. CALVE, CYNTHIA L. MURPHY, and BRUCE T. WIEDER, Administrative Patent Judges. MURPHY, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL The Appellant1 appeals from the Examiner’s rejections of claims 1-10, 12-14, and 23-25 under 35 U.S.C. § 103. We REVERSE.2 1 The Appellant is the “applicant” as defined by 37 C.F.R. § 1.42 (e.g., “the inventor or all of the joint inventors”). “The real party in interest in this appeal is the following party: International Business Machines Corporation.” (Appeal Br. 2.) 2 We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. §§ 6(b) and 134(a). Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 2 THE APPELLANT’S INVENTION According to the Appellant, its invention relates generally to “scalable and traceable healthcare analytics management.” (Spec. ¶ 1.) This management involves a “sub-system” that develops “an analytics pipeline of a set of analytics assets for a selected healthcare based on a set of business needs for a healthcare analytics client.” (Id. ¶ 4.) SOLE INDEPENDENT CLAIM ON APPEAL l. A method, in a data processing system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the at least one memory comprising instructions executed by the at least one processor to cause the at least one processor to implement a healthcare analytics management system, the method comprising: developing, by a healthcare analytics development sub- system of the healthcare analytics management system, an analytics pipeline of a set of analytics assets based on a set of business needs for a healthcare analytics client and a healthcare analytics model based on the set of analytics assets and the set of business needs, wherein the healthcare analytics model links to the analytics pipeline; deploying, by a model deployment module of a healthcare analytics operation sub-system of the healthcare analytics management system, the healthcare analytics model on a set of computing devices of the healthcare analytics client; responsive to a model monitoring module of the healthcare analytics operation sub-system detecting a performance deviation of the deployed healthcare analytics model for performance deviation from the set of business needs for the healthcare analytics client, determining, by a model feedback module of the healthcare analytics operation sub- system, improvement needs for the healthcare analytics model using continuous learning based on a machine learning model; feeding, by the model feedback module, the improvement needs back to the healthcare analytics development sub-system; and Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 3 customizing, by the healthcare analytics development sub-system, the healthcare analytics model based on the improvement needs. REJECTIONS3 The Examiner rejects claims 1-5, 9, 10, and 12 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Marzula,4 Cancelliere,5 Thompson,6 and Duggal.7 (Final Act. 6.) The Examiner rejects claims 6-8 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, and SAS.8 (Final Act. 15.) The Examiner rejects claim 13 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, and Moore.9 (Final Act. 17.) The Examiner rejects claim 14 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, SAS, and Moore. (Final Act. 18.) 3 The Examiner’s rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 101 (see Final Act. 3) and 35 U.S.C. § 112 (see id. at 2) have been withdrawn (see Answer 4). 4 US 2016/0019357 A1, published January 21, 2016. 5 US 2016/0071171 A1, published March 10, 2016. 6 US 8,200,527 B1, issued June 12, 2012. 7 US 2013/0246996 A1, published September 19, 2013. 8 SAS Model Manager: Create, manage, monitor and govern analytical models, Fact Sheet (2015). 9 US 2015/0025925 A1, published January 22, 2015. Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 4 The Examiner rejects claims 23 and 24 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, and Yu.10 (Final Act. 19.) The Examiner rejects claim 25 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, and Lin.11 (Final Act. 20.) ANALYSIS Independent claim 1 requires “an analytics pipeline of a set of analytics assets based on a set of business needs for a healthcare analytics client.” (Appeal Br., Claims App.) The Examiner’s obviousness rejections are premised upon a finding that Marzula discloses such a pipeline of analytics assets. (See Final Act. 6.) We are persuaded by the Appellant’s argument that this finding by the Examiner is not adequately supported by the record. (See Appeal Br. 12.) Marzula discloses a method “for providing healthcare analytics.” (Marzula ¶ 2.) With Marzula’s method, a computer system “receives data associated with a healthcare provider’s operation and performance from one or more data sources.” (Id. ¶ 6.) “The data received from the one or more data sources is then aggregated” and “[t]he aggregated data is processed utilizing one or more data analytics models to generate healthcare analytics data.” (Id.) According to the Examiner, the “data collected from multiple sources used for analytics models” can be considered the “analytics assets” required by independent claim 1. (Final Act. 6-7, italics omitted.) The Examiner 10 US 9,542,566 B2, issued January 10, 2017. 11 US 8,370,280 B1, issued February 5, 2013. Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 5 further explains that because “data is collected from multiple sources” there is “a pipeline of multiple sources of useful ‘asset’ data.” (Answer 6.) Thus, the Examiner’s rejections are premised upon data constituting the claimed analytics assets. However, we agree with the Appellant that the Specification conveys that the claimed analytics assets are “software assets, not data.” (Reply Br. 4.) And, although the Examiner must apply the “broadest reasonable interpretation of the claim language” (Answer 6), the meaning given to a claim term must be consistent with the use of the claim term in the Specification (see In re Cortright, 165 F.3d 135, 1359 (Fed. Cir. 1999); In re Suitco Surface, Inc. 603 F.3d 1255, 1260 (Fed. Cir. 2010.)). Here, the Specification draws a distinction between analytics assets and data. For example, the Specification describes the pipeline-developing sub-system as comprising “analytics pipeline repositories” which capture “analytics assets,” “analytics workflow pipeline or dependency of assets,” and “any metadata or configuration data to support the workflow.” (Spec. ¶¶ 59-62.) Thus, “analytics assets” are listed separately from “data.” Also, in an illustrated embodiment, an analytics repository 310 comprises a data base 311 and components 312-315. (See Spec. ¶ 51.) The data base 311 contains “business need data.” (Id.) The component 312 “analyzes the business need data in data base 311 and generates insights from the data,” component 313 “identifies groups of patients based on attributes in the patient data for the study need,” component 314 “identifies features that represent each population” identified by component 313, and component 315 “predicts an outcome for a given patient and suggests actions to benefit from the predictions.” (Id.) In other words, the Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 6 components 312-315 are described as software components, and these software components 312-315 are further identified as analytics assets.12 Thus, there is a demarcation between analytics assets (software components 312-315) and data (data base 311). (See also id. ¶ 75, Fig. 5.) The Specification additionally describes the analytics assets as “deployed analytics assets.” (Spec. ¶ 26.) Indeed, the analytics assets can “be deployed as near real-time applications and integrated [into] operational systems” in order to gain a “benefit.” (Id. ¶ 19.)13 And, per the Appellant, “[o]ne does not deploy a pipeline of data sources.” (Reply Br. 4.) The Specification further describes the analytics assets as “configurable analytics assets.” (Spec. ¶ 25.) “Configurations are exposed” through Application Programming Interface (API) services “to minimize manual code changes.” (Id.; see also ¶ 24.) Such code changes would seem to be relevant to software but not data. Consequently, we agree with the Appellant that, when the claim term “analytics assets” is construed in a manner consistent with the Specification, this claim term requires software assets, and does not encompass data. (See 12 Original claim 2 set forth that “the set of analytics assets comprise one or more analytics assets from the group consisting of data quality and insights, cohort construction, feature construction, and prescriptive and predictive analytics.” (Spec. p28:25-27.) 13 The Examiner implies that this sentence “merely states that the assets must be deployed [in] real-time applications specifically for healthcare users to benefit.” (Answer 5 (emphasis omitted).) Insofar as the Examiner is saying that claims do not require the claimed analytics assets to be deployed in real- time (see id.), we do not necessarily disagree. However, this sentence, in conjunction with other descriptions in the Specification, fosters an understanding that “analytics assets” are software applications “that are deployed” (See Reply Br. 4). Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 7 Appeal Br. 15.) As such, the Examiner has not adequately established that the prior art shows or suggests the analytics assets required by the claims. Thus, we do not sustain the Examiner’s rejection of independent claim 1, and the claims depending therefrom.14 CONCLUSION Claims Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/ Basis Affirmed Reversed 1-5, 9, 10, 12 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal 1-5, 9, 10, 12 6-8 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, SAS 6-8 13 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, Moore 13 14 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, SAS, Moore 14 23, 24 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, Yu 23, 24 14 The Examiner’s further findings and determinations with respect to the dependent claims do not compensate for the shortcoming in the rejection of claim 1. (See Final Act. 11-21.) Appeal 2021-001008 Application 15/833,044 8 Claims Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/ Basis Affirmed Reversed 25 103 Marzula, Cancelliere, Thompson, Duggal, Lin 25 Overall Outcome 1-10, 12-14, 23-25 REVERSED