Two Case Studies Navigating AI Patent Claims in Healthcare and MedTech
May 9, 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming healthcare and medical technologies, but it introduces complex legal challenges for patent protection. Janine Swarbrick from HGF examines this by exploring two European Patent Office (EPO) case studies that highlight crucial considerations for AI patent claims.
AI interventions must show a clear technical character beyond just a mathematical method or a computer-automated task. Claims must detail how AI processes data to produce a meaningful technical output. In one of the case studies, a patent for a machine learning model analyzing medical data was rejected due to insufficient technical details, while the other, capable of analyzing a mixture of DNA from different origins, was accepted as it demonstrated a clear technical effect through specific steps and detailed mathematical processing.
These cases underscore the importance of including detailed descriptions in AI patent applications to meet EPO requirements and ensure the claims are seen as technical rather than abstract mathematical methods.
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[Source: HGF, May 2024]
