US Patent Issued to Intuitive Surgical Operations on Sept. 1 for "Systems and methods for detecting tissue contact by an ultrasound probe" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 1 -- United States Patent no. 12,721,593, issued on Sept. 1, 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 computer-assisted surgical system is configured to perform a process comprising: generating an ultrasound image; determining a plurality of local descriptor values each corresponding to a different pixel included in a plurality of pixels i...