ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,433,713, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Siemens Healthineers AG (Forchheim, Germany).
"Guiding a needle using a radiopaque contour" was invented by Amilcar Alzaga (Nuremberg, Germany) and Alois Regensburger (Erlangen, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A guide unit for guiding a medical object such as a needle includes a locking unit, by which the guide unit may be disposed on the medical object. In order to enable a position of a medical object to be precisely determined, an aligning element that is in a fixed pose relative to the locking unit is provided. A contour that has a higher radiopacity than a remainder of the aligning el...