US Patent Issued to Intuitive Surgical Operations on April 29 for "Systems and methods for detecting tissue contact by an ultrasound probe" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,285,288, issued on April 29, was assigned to Intuitive Surgical Operations Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for detecting tissue contact by an ultrasound probe" was invented by A. Jonathan McLeod (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Mahdi Azizian (San Jose, Calif.), Daniel Proksch (San Jose, Calif.), Azad Shademan (Campbell, Calif.) and Pourya Shirazian (Menlo Park, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A contact detection system is configured to classify each pixel in a plurality of pixels included in an ultrasound image captured by an ultrasound probe located within a patient as either showing tissue or showing non-tissue; determine an av...