Opinion ID: 209348
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Construction of Wound

Text: Defendants argue that the district court erred by vacating its construction of wound when the term's meaning was critical to the obviousness inquiry. According to Defendants, this error allowed KCI to improperly avoid the prior art by arguing claim construction to the jury. Specifically, Defendants take issue with KCI's characterization at trial of the Chariker-Jeter, Svedman, Johnson, and Davydov references as draining fistulae, irrigating wounds, immobilizing skin grafts, and draining bodily fluids, respectively, as opposed to treating wounds with negative pressure. Defendants' expert testified that under the plain and ordinary meaning of wound, each of the prior art references disclosed treating a wound with negative pressure. The effect of this, according to Defendants, was that the jury was improperly forced to choose between competing claim constructions offered by the experts. Defendants ask us to adopt their proposed plain and ordinary meaning construction, taken from Stedman's Medical Dictionary: (1) trauma to any of the tissues of the body, especially that caused by physical means and with interruption of continuity [or] (2) a surgical incision. They argue that the specification's use of broad language when describing the wounds that can be treated shows that the ordinary meaning, as defined in the dictionary, was intended. See '643 patent col.12 ll.41-42 (Negative pressure appliances are useful for treating a variety of wounds.); id. col.13 ll.24-25 (The present invention also includes a method of treating damaged tissue....). Additionally, Defendants cite the numerous examples in the '643 patent's specification that describe open wounds, infected wounds, burn wounds, skin graft and skin flap wounds, decubitus ulcer wounds, incisional wounds, chronic open wounds secondary to stasis ulcers, and wounds which respond to increased blood flow, to support their proposed construction. KCI responds that any error resulting from the district court's failure to construe the wound phrases is harmless because Defendants' proposed construction is incorrect as a matter of law and the jury's verdict demonstrates that it adopted the correct construction. According to KCI, the correct construction of wound is tissue damage to the surface of the body, including the epithelial and subcutaneous layers. KCI argues that while the specification may refer to a variety of wounds, each and every example specifically described is a skin wound. Therefore, KCI alleges, the Stedman's Medical Dictionary definition is broader than the scope of the specification and cannot be used to define wound as used in the claims. Further, KCI notes that under Defendants' proposed construction, wound would include, in addition to fistulae, conditions such as ruptured appendices and stomach ulcers that the specification in no way suggests can be treated according to the claimed invention. Appellee's Br. 53. As a threshold matter, it appears that the parties' dispute over the construction of wound only affects the Chariker-Jeter and Davydov references. At trial, KCI did not contest that wounds were the subject of both the Svedman and Johnson articles. For example, KCI's expert, Dr. Orgill, testified that, in the Johnson reference, [t]he skin graft is closing the wound. J.A. 204,899. Similarly, Dr. Orgill described the Svedman article as teaching irrigation of a wound. J.A. 204,923. Therefore, the effect of any error in the failure to construe wound is limited to the Chariker-Jeter and Davydov references. [3] We agree with KCI that wound, as used in the asserted patents, does not cover the fistulae described in the Chariker-Jeter publications and the pus pockets described in the Davydov references. As this court held in Phillips v. AWH Corp ., the specification `is always highly relevant to the claim construction analysis. Usually, it is dispositive; it is the single best guide to the meaning of a disputed term.' 415 F.3d 1303, 1315 (Fed.Cir.2005) (en banc) (quoting Vitronics Corp. v. Conceptronic, Inc., 90 F.3d 1576, 1582 (Fed. Cir.1996)). All of the examples described in the specification involve skin wounds. See id. at 1321 (Properly viewed, the `ordinary meaning' of a claim term is its meaning to the ordinary artisan after reading the entire patent.). To construe wound to include fistulae and pus pockets would thus expand the scope of the claims far beyond anything described in the specification. See Nystrom v. TREX Co., 424 F.3d 1136, 1145 (Fed.Cir.2005) ([I]n the absence of something in the written description and/or prosecution history to provide explicit or implicit notice to the publici.e., those of ordinary skill in the artthat the inventor intended a disputed term to cover more than the ordinary and customary meaning revealed by the context of the intrinsic record, it is improper to read the term to encompass a broader definition simply because it may be found in a dictionary, treatise, or other extrinsic source.). We further conclude that the district court's failure to instruct the jury on the construction of wound in this case was harmless. [4] See B. Braun Med., Inc. v. Abbott Labs., 124 F.3d 1419, 1423 (Fed.Cir. 1997) (holding that the district court's pre- Markman failure to instruct the jury on the construction of a means-plus-function limitation was harmless because the jury adopted the correct construction). Because the jury's verdict is supported under the proper construction, and because we perceive no danger under the circumstances of this case that the jury may have used an incorrect construction of wound that might have prejudiced Defendants, there is no need to remand for a new trial.