U.S. Patent 8108072 was awarded to Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. on 2012-01-31 and describes a “Methods and systems for robotic instrument tool tracking with adaptive fusion of kinematics information and image information.” This patent has been cited 289 times by other U.S. patents which places it in the top 500 cited patents since 2010 according to our law firm research, and makes it of the most innovative medical technology patents in the field of instruments. The abstract states:

In one embodiment of the invention, a method for a robotic system is disclosed to track one or more robotic instruments. The method includes generating kinematics information for the robotic instrument within a field of view of a camera; capturing image information in the field of view of the camera; and adaptively fusing the kinematics information and the image information together to determine pose information of the robotic instrument. Additionally disclosed is a robotic medical system with a tool tracking sub-system. The tool tracking sub-system receives raw kinematics information and video image information of the robotic instrument to generate corrected kinematics information for the robotic instrument by adaptively fusing the raw kinematics information and the video image information together. Link: U.S. Patent 8108072

This patent was originally filed on 2007-09-30 which gives it a processing time of 1584 days, compared to an average processing time of 1425 in the field. Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. has 692 total patents. The first named inventor is Brian D. Hoffman of Mountain View, CA. The primary examiner was Thomas Black.

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