ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,446,907, issued on Oct. 21, was assigned to Covidien LP (Mansfield, Mass.).
"Methods and apparatus for flow restoration" was invented by Earl Howard Slee (Laguna Niguel, Calif.), Thomas Wilder III (Newport Bearch, Calif.), Thomas McCarthy (San Clemente, Calif.), Mark Philip Ashby (Laguna Niguel, Calif.) and Sanjay Shrivastava (Irvine, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods for restoring blood flow in occluded blood vessels using an apparatus having a self-expandable distal segment that is pre-formed to assume a superimposed structure in an unconstrained condition but can be made to take on a volume-reduced form making it possible ...