[Insight-users] ICP (Iterative Closest Point) Patent

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Raghu,

Thanks for searching on the patent information
about the ICP algorithm.

I'm afraid that serious advice on this matter could
only be provided by an intellectual property attorney.

After reading the patent claim, it seems to me that even
though ICP is not the central aspect of the claim, the
method is clearly depicted in it.

The worrisome part is that ICP is very widely used in
the medical field, in particular in image guided surgery.
If General Motors Corp. is actually enforcing the patent,
there would be many medical applications out there that
will be touched.

The natural consequence is that people will move to use
a variant of the method, making it different enough for
not being covered by the patent claim. The question of
course is "how different" will be "different enough", and
that's the type of questions that only an Intellectual
Property Attorney could answer.



   Regards,



     Luis




------------------------
Raghu Venkatram wrote:

> Hi Luis,
> 
....

> Also luis, I did a patent search on the Iterative Closest Point
> algorithm, as I remember Paul Besl, the primary author, mentioning in
> one of his talks that he ahd a patent.
> 
> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=besl.INZZ.&OS=IN/besl&RS=IN/besl
> 
> Our application just like ITK is open source, please let me know if we
> would be violating
> any patents by using ICP for image registration. 
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> Raghu
> 
>