Patent ID: 7644016

Claim:
A method for identifying the contents of a surgical instrument tray, comprising: positioning a radio frequency reader on a conveying mechanism, the radio frequency reader including a transceiver; installing one or more transceivers on a surgical instrument tray; positioning at least one radio frequency identification (RFID) tag on each of a plurality of surgical instruments; writing data into the radio frequency identification tag; placing the tagged surgical instruments inside the surgical instrument tray; presenting the surgical instrument tray into a wireless radio frequency field of the radio frequency reader; transmitting an RF signal containing the data from the tagged surgical instruments back to the reader; transmitting an RF signal containing data from the one or more transceivers back to the reader; transferring the data from the tagged surgical instruments and the data from the one or more transceivers to a data terminal connected to the radio frequency reader; comparing the radio frequency tagged surgical instrument data and one or more transceivers data to a database that includes predetermined surgical instrument data and predetermined surgical instrument tray data, thereby identifying the tagged surgical instruments inside the surgical instrument tray and the surgical instrument tray; and verifying that the surgical instrument tray and the surgical instruments correspond with each other to identify missing surgical instruments when the surgical instrument tray is missing surgical instruments and to identify extra surgical instruments when the surgical instrument tray contains extra surgical instruments.