US Patent Issued to Covidien on May 20 for "Autonomous endobronchial access with an EM guided catheter" (Minnesota Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,303,220, issued on May 20, was assigned to Covidien LP (Mansfield, Mass.).

"Autonomous endobronchial access with an EM guided catheter" was invented by Evan Arsham Hosseini (Eden Prairie, Minn.) and Nathan J. Knutson (Long Lake, Minn.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system for performing a surgical procedure includes a controller including a memory and a processor, the memory storing instructions, which when executed by the processor cause the processor to receive an image captured by a camera, generate a segmented image by applying a first threshold value to the image captured by the camera, identify a lumen within the segmented image,...