This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
LaserSight gets broad patent approval
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
WINTER PARK, Fla. — LaserSight announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a Notice of Allowance, thereby completing its examination of LaserSight’s reissue application for the Company’s U.S. Patent No. 5,520,679, known as the ’679 patent.
Prior to the reissue, the original ’679 patent included one independent claim and 23 total claims, whereas the reissue application adds nine new independent claims and a total of 68 additional claims to better encompass the breadth of technology to which LaserSight is entitled. The 23 original claims remain essentially unchanged.
The Patent and Trademark Office allows reissue applications to be filed subsequent to a patent being issued to allow a patent owner to broaden claims that may have been constructed too narrowly in the original patent. The Notice of Allowance of LaserSight’s reissue application confirms that the original ’679 claims were, indeed, narrower than necessary, and the claims added during the reissue have strengthened and expanded the scope of the patent’s coverage.
The fundamental teachings of the original ’679 patent encompass a refractive laser system utilizing an excimer laser with a low fluence and high repetition rate that ablates corneal tissue using small pulses delivered to the corneal surface in an overlapping pattern. Through the reissue process, LaserSight was able to broaden several elements of the ’679 Patent’s original claims by removing certain restrictive elements.
LaserSight now owns exclusive rights to methods for ablating tissue that comprise the provision of a basic laser having a pulsed output laser beam of a fundamental ultraviolet wavelength of 193 nm exiting from an output window of the basic laser, and a repetition rate of 1 Hz to 1000 Hz; the focusing of the pulsed output laser beam onto the tissue to a predetermined generally fixed spot size; and the scanning of the pulsed output laser beam, through known positions of an optical device moved by galvanometric forces, into a substantially overlapping pattern of beam pulses on the tissue such that adjacent ablation spots on a single ablation layer of the tissue significantly overlap one another and remove from 0.05 to 0.5 microns of tissue per pulse.