The Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court ruling that several patents for dental image analysis using “deep learning” are invalid as directed to an ineligible subject matter.
As the court explained, “A “deep learning device” is a machine learning device that, through training, can analyze images and recognize patterns within the images.”
Dental Monitoring SAS owns two patents that relate to the field of dental arch image analysis.
The ’248 patent is directed to a method for assessing the shape of an orthodontic aligner using a “deep learning device.”
The ’409 patent is directed to a method for acquiring an image of a dental arch and analyzing it using a “deep learning device.”
As the court noted, “Orthodontic aligners are used to reposition a patient’s teeth via an iteration of several aligners that gradually move the teeth from a starting to final dentition.”
That process is “typically done with periodic visual assessments by a dental practitioner to evaluate progress and determine whether to move to the next aligner.”
In 2022, Dental Monitoring sued Align Technology, Inc. for infringement of claims of both the ’248 and ’409 patents.
Dental Monitoring alleged that Align’s Invisalign Virtual Care Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform and related apparatuses — accessories to its “Invisalign” dental aligner products — infringed claims of the patents.
The district court agreed with Align that certain patent claims were ineligible under 35 U.S. Code §101 as a matter of law.
Section 101 states that:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
The district court concluded that claim 14 of the ’248 patent was “directed to [the] patent-ineligible concept” of “collecting information, analyzing it, and displaying certain results of the collection and analysis.”
The court also concluded that independent claim 1 of the ‘409 patent was directed to the abstract idea of acquiring and analyzing an image, then presenting the image in a message to guide the user to take a new image.
The district court then reasoned that claim 12 of the ‘409 patent “merely recite[d] a common practice long performed by dental practitioners.”
The court concluded that claim 14 of the ’248 was not patent eligible “because the claim used generic hardware to simply accomplish the abstract idea in the specific field of dental aligner assessment.”
The Federal Circuit agreed, finding that
Both claims thus fall within the “familiar class of [patent-ineligible] claims” that focus on “collecting information, analyzing it, and displaying certain results of the collection and analysis.”
The court wasn’t impressed by the “deep learning” aspects of the patent claims.
Said the court,
That the claims utilize a “deep learning device” to analyze the images does not change our analysis. The specifications state that the “deep learning device” is “preferably a neural network” that could be from a preset list of many “networks specializing in the classification of images” or “networks specializing in the location and detection of objections in an image.”
The court concluded:
The… claims are thus ineligible because they simply apply machine learning to the above-mentioned abstract ideas in a new environment––the field of dental arch image analysis.
Dental Monitoring argued that the claims were patentable because the “deep learning device” must be trained in a specific process.
The court disagreed, saying
that a machine learning model is specially trained is “incident to the very nature of machine learning.”… That the “deep learning device” here is trained on specific images does not make the “deep learning device” itself non-generic.
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