Patent decision

BL number

O/774/22

Concerning rights in

GB 1916451.6

Hearing Officer

Mr S Brown

Decision date

8 September 2022

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Flatiron Health, Inc

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

1 The application concerns extracting information from unstructured medical data, deriving feature vectors and providing them to a machine learning model. The model provides an output indicating whether an individual should be included in a cohort of individuals for participation in a medical trial.

The Hearing Officer applied the Aerotel/Macrossan test and considered the signposts laid out in HTC v Apple. He also considered Halliburton, Lenovo and the Office’s decision in Innoplexus (BL O/814/21). He decided that the contribution made by the invention was excluded as a program for a computer and a method of doing business as such. The application was refused under section 18(3).

Full decision O/774/22 352Kb