Patent decision

BL number

O/592/21

Concerning rights in

GB1521342.4

Hearing Officer

Mr H Jones

Decision date

10 August 2021

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Kofax International Switzerland Sàrl

Provisions discussed

Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application relates to a problem that occurs when transferring electronic medical images from one picture archive system (PACS) to another, for instance from a PACS associated with a first healthcare institution and another PACS associated with a second healthcare institution. While there exists a protocol (DICOM) for communicating between PACS, there is a lack of standardisation in the values that populate metadata fields associated with the DICOM medical images. The proposed solution to this problem is to modify the metadata during the transfer process so that it matches the format of the metadata of the recipient PACS. In addition, the invention involves logging when an error occurs in the metadata modification process. The hearing officer found that the invention set out in the application related very clearly to a computer program as such and did not need to consider the question of whether it was also a business method. The application was refused.

Full decisionO/592/21  99Kb