US Patent Issued to Intuitive Surgical Operations on April 14 for "Systems and methods for detecting physical contact of a surgical instrument with patient tissue" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,599,298, issued on April 14, was assigned to Intuitive Surgical Operations Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for detecting physical contact of a surgical instrument with patient tissue" was invented by Jonathan D. Halderman (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Kayla K. Anderson (Campbell, Calif.) and Anqi Fan (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A tissue contact detection system tracks, over time during a surgical procedure, a temperature of a surgical instrument associated with a surgical system used for the surgical procedure. The system determines, based on the tracked temperature of the surgical instrument, that the temper...