CAFC Precedential Decision on Rule 12(b)(6) Affirms Patent Ineligibility of Medical Scan Visualization Claims

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision decision authored by Judge Reyna today affirming a district court’s grant of a Rule 12(b)(6) motion alleging that AI Visualize’s patent claims were ineligible under Section 101.

AI Visualize owns U.S. Patent Nos. 8,701,167 (’167 patent), 9,106,609 (’609 patent), 9,438,667 (’667 patent), and 10,930,397 (’397 patent), which all relate to visualization of medical scans. AI Visualize sued Nuance Communications, Inc. and Mach7 Technologies, Inc. for patent infringement. Nuance filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, arguing the claims were directed to patent ineligible subject matter. Since AI Visualize’s Amended Complaint provided no further information about the eligibility of the claims and neither party asked for claim construction, the district court reviewed the eligibility of the claims and concluded they were all ineligible.

At Alice step one, the court found the claims were directed to the abstract idea of “retrieving user-requested, remotely stored information.” At step two, the court said the inventive component of Claim 1, which is “the ability to obtain virtual views of a [“volume visualization dataset”] VVD over a low bandwidth, high latency network,” was only apparent in one limitation and that limitation was “claimed functionally, at a high level of generality,” and thus failed to save the claims from abstraction.

In its analysis, the CAFC agreed that the claims were abstract at step one, explaining that the relevant claims “recite a system that includes the functionally-oriented steps of: storing data (VVD) on a server, accepting user requests to view a portion of that data (virtual views), checking for the location of all data needed for the virtual view, “creating” image frames from any non-locally-stored virtual view data, transmitting all non-locally-stored image frames to the user, compiling all image frames, and sequentially displaying the image frames to the user.” This amounts to converting data and then using computers to collect and display the data, said the CAFC.

AI Visualize argued the claims “require the creation of ‘on the fly’ virtual views at a client computer,” and are therefore not abstract. Citing to Hawk Tech. Sys., LLC v. Castle Retail, LLC, 60 F.4th 1349 (Fed. Cir. 2023) for support, the court said the claims merely create a virtual view from the existing VVD, amounting to abstract data manipulation.

Hawk Technology Systems was a precedential 2023 CAFC holding in which the court affirmed a district court’s holding that Hawk’s patent infringement case regarding its patent for a “high-quality, reduced data rate streaming video product and monitoring system” should be dismissed under Rule 12(b)(6) for ineligibility under Section 101.

Although AI Visualize pointed to multiple passages from the specification to support its view that “creation” of virtual views provides a technical solution to a technical problem, the CAFC said it refuses “to import details from the specification if those details are themselves not claimed.”

As to Alice step two, AI Visualize argued that the creation of virtual views and the creation of virtual views on demand or in real time transforms the claims into “significantly more” than the abstract idea. Citing to Affinity Labs of Tex., LLC v. DIRECTV, LLC, 838 F.3d 1253, 1257 (Fed. Cir. 2016) and Elec. Power Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2016), the CAFC concluded that AI Visualize had “not made sufficient factual allegations to support that the claims involve unconventional technology or a concrete application of the abstract idea of virtual view ‘creation.’” The district court’s Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal was thus affirmed.