PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 16204593
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-11
Publication Date: 2019-06
Patent Classification: ["385", "037000"]

Abstract:
An intravascular or other 2D or 3D imaging apparatus can include a minimally-invasive distal imaging guidewire portion. A plurality of thin optical fibers can be circumferentially distributed about a cylindrical guidewire core, such as in an spiral-wound or otherwise attached optical fiber ribbon. A low refractive index coating, high numerical aperture (NA) fiber, or other technique can be used to overcome challenges of using extremely thin optical fibers. Coating and ribbonizing techniques are described. Also described are non-uniform refractive index peak amplitudes or wavelengths techniques for FBG writing, using a depressed index optical cladding, chirping, a self-aligned connector, optical fiber routing and alignment techniques for a system connector, and an adapter for connecting to standard optical fiber coupling connectors.

Claim (Index 17):
An optical fiber assembly for receiving an optical fiber ribbon, the assembly comprising:\n a first connector configured to receive the ribbon and spread the fibers of the ribbon onto a wider pitch than a pitch of the optical fiber ribbon, the first connector including a ferrule having first and second housing portions providing opposing faces facing each other, wherein the first housing portion defines a plurality of grooves, wherein each groove provides an optical fiber passage for a corresponding individual optical fiber; an insert, including a ribbon channel, sized, shaped, or otherwise configured to receive the ribbon; and a plurality of individual fiber channels, branching off from the ribbon channel, the individual fiber channels sized, shaped, or otherwise configured to receive and spread individual fibers of the ribbon, wherein the insert is configured such that outer-most optical fibers in the optical fiber ribbon are individually picked off first and guided into corresponding individual optical fiber channels, and successively closer optical fibers to an axial center of the optical fiber ribbon are sequentially picked off and guided into corresponding individual optical fiber channels.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 17.0
- Percentile: 98.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.63415
- Patent Class: 385.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['14774654', '14949605', '11285499', '12192169', '14045189']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8155324905226532
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.574267226564891
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7914059641268769
- Mean Citation Score: 276.23251600000003
- Max Citation Score: 521.87494
- Similarity Product: 377.32431722805023

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 0
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 0
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test