US 10782166

I'll pull authoritative records for this exact patent number and check for any 2026 CAFC activity.

Let me pull the issued claim set for this exact patent and double-check for any litigation.

US Patent 10,782,166 — Analyst Summary

1. Bibliographic record (as printed on the face of the document / Google Patents record)

Continuation chain (quoted from the patent text): 16/381,518 is a continuation of Ser. No. 15/950,614 (filed 2018‑04‑11), which is a continuation of Ser. No. 15/247,120 (filed 2016‑08‑25, now US 9,970,794), which claims the benefit of provisional 62/211,309 (2015‑08‑28). The PCT counterpart is PCT/US2016/048719 (WO 2017/040208 A1).

Later family members claiming priority from this patent: US 16/994,792 → US 11,674,831 B2 (2020‑08‑17); US 18/142,367 → US 12,529,582 B2 (2023‑05‑02). EP family: EP 3,341,052 B1 (granted 2021‑09‑29) and a divisional EP 3,922,286 B1. Japanese counterparts: JP 6,940,485 B2 / JP 6,947,799 B2.

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A flow sensor sub-assembly for sensing flow of a fluidic medicament includes a flow tube having a flow tube inlet and a flow tube outlet, and an acoustical transmission rate. The medicament flows through the flow tube. A first piezo element is arranged at an upstream position of the flow tube and a second piezo element is arranged at a downstream position of the flow tube, such that the first piezo element and the second piezo element are mounted apart a pre-selected distance from each other. An absorber sheath encircles the flow tube. The absorber sheath has an upstream end and a downstream end. The absorber sheath is comprised of a material with an acoustical transmission rate different than the flow tube."

3. Plain‑language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Verification caveat: the authoritative full text supplied for US 10,782,166 contains the abstract, definitions, description and figures but no numbered granted claim set, so I could not verify the issued claims word‑for‑word. The two independent claims below are taken from the pre‑grant publication of this same application, US 2019/0234779 A1 (application 16/381,518, which issued as US 10,782,166), as reproduced at https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190234779. Treat the wording as provisional pending a USPTO PatentCenter/PATFT check of the issued claims (the published set runs to at least 17 claims; the Japanese family members carry 28 and 32 claims respectively, so claim numbering differs across the family).

Independent Claim 1 — "fitting‑to‑fitting absorber" species
A flow sensor sub‑assembly for sensing flow of a fluidic medicament, comprising:

• a flow tube with an inlet and an outlet, the medicament flowing through it;
• an inlet fitting at the inlet and an outlet fitting at the outlet; and
• an absorber sheath encircling the flow tube between the inlet fitting and the outlet fitting.

In plain terms: a rigid (in examples, stainless‑steel) flow tube is capped by two end fittings, and a sleeve of acoustically dissimilar material is wrapped around the free span of the tube to damp spurious acoustic energy.

Independent Claim 12 — "gap / two‑tube" species
A flow sensor sub‑assembly for sensing flow of a fluidic medicament, comprising:

• a flow tube sub‑assembly having a first flow tube and a second flow tube, each with its own inlet, outlet and outside diameter, the medicament flowing through them; and
• an absorber sheath connecting the first flow tube outlet to the second flow tube inlet, with the medicament flowing through at least a portion of the absorber sheath itself.

In plain terms: the metal flow tube is physically cut and the two halves are bridged by the absorber sleeve — which therefore becomes part of the fluid path — so the absorber breaks the continuous metal acoustic path between the two piezo elements.

Representative dependent-claim subject matter (dependent claims of the published set): absorber material having a different acoustical transmission rate than the flow tube; first/second piezo (ultrasonic) elements mounted to the inlet/outlet fittings a pre‑selected distance apart and annular in shape; absorber heat‑shrunk onto the flow tube OD or adhered with an acoustically transparent adhesive; stainless‑steel flow tube; plastic/PVC/elastomeric absorber; absorber ends spaced about 6 mm from the fittings; a gap between the first and second flow tubes; an attenuation improvement of at least 60% versus no absorber; and a system-level claim in which the disposable sub‑assembly sits in a flow sensor housing coupled to a reusable base containing a microprocessor, the sub‑assembly being disposed of after use while the base is reused.

Technical payload of the specification (why it matters): the absorber damps out‑of‑phase/rogue vibrations and structure‑borne crosstalk between the two 533 kHz transducers. In the disclosed SolidWorks simulation, cutting the tube and adding the absorber sheath (Example Case 2) attenuated the drive signal by roughly 60–75%; heat‑shrink variants (EPS‑300, MFP; PVDF or adhesive‑lined polyolefin) were also preferred. The patent also describes fitting adhesive and transducer adhesive that improve transmission across the fitting–tube and transducer–fitting zones, and a spring‑contact/single‑sided PCBA interface to the silvered piezo crystals.

4. CAFC 2026 docket / litigation check

• No Federal Circuit appeal involving US 10,782,166 was identified. Searches of the Federal Circuit's scheduled‑cases listings for 2026 (including the June 2026 calendar) and general docket/appeal queries returned no case naming this patent — the 2026 CAFC hits were unrelated matters (e.g., Spero v. Mercedes‑Benz USA, Nos. 2025‑1470/1472; ParkerVision v. Qualcomm; Ascendis Pharma v. BioMarin, No. 2026‑1026).
• No district‑court infringement suit and no IPR/PGR against this patent was identified in these searches. Public assignment/ownership records (e.g., PlainSite's Crisi Medical Systems docket‑derived table) show only the ordinary prosecution and assignment transactions for application 16/381,518, not litigation.
• Limitation: these were targeted keyword searches of public web sources, not a query of PACER, Docket Navigator, or the CAFC's full electronic docket. I therefore cannot state with certainty that no such proceeding exists; if a docket‑level negative is required, a PACER/CAFC CM/ECF or commercial‑docket check should be run.

5. Points of uncertainty / caution

1. Assignee naming: the authoritative patent page lists "Crisi Medical Systems Inc." Published register records for the EP family give the holder's address as 1 Becton Drive, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey 07417 (Becton, Dickinson and Company's corporate address), and one aggregator listed "Becton Dickinson and Co" alongside "Crisi Medical Systems Inc" as an interested party. I am not asserting that Becton, Dickinson and Company is the assignee of record on US 10,782,166's face; the face value is Crisi Medical Systems Inc.
2. Claim set: as noted, I am relying on the pre‑grant publication claims for application 16/381,518 because the supplied full text lacked a granted claim section. The internal description text refers to "at least 60%" and "at least 75%" attenuation improvements, matching the published claim 8 (60%) and the description's 75% gap embodiment.
3. All legal‑status items (Active; 2036‑08‑25 expiration) are database annotations, not legal conclusions.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10782166 across patent litigation databases.

Those results are unrelated. Let me search patent litigation databases directly.

Let me search more specifically for litigation by the patent owner and the patent's family.

Summary of Findings: US Patent 10,782,166 — Litigation Search

Bottom line: I could not identify any known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,782,166 based on the searches performed.

What I searched

I ran queries targeting patent-litigation aggregators and general web sources, including:

• US patent 10782166 litigation
• "10782166" patent lawsuit defendant
• Crisi Medical Systems patent infringement lawsuit
• "Crisi Medical Systems" v. defendant patent infringement complaint district court
• Unified Patents litigation portal references (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/...)

What came back

Every hit was a false positive on the number string, not the patent:

No district court complaint, ITC action, PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR), or CAFC appeal listing U.S. Patent No. 10,782,166 as an asserted or challenged patent appeared in the results.

Patent ownership context (from the authoritative patent text)

• Patent: US 10,782,166 B2, "Flow Sensor System with Absorber"
• Current/Original Assignee: Crisi Medical Systems, Inc.
• Inventor: Shawn Wayne DeKalb
• Priority date: 2015-08-28; Filed: 2019-04-11; Granted: 2020-09-22
• Family: Continuation of Ser. No. 15/950,614 → Ser. No. 15/247,120 (now US 9,970,794), claiming benefit of Provisional 62/211,309. Related later filings: US 16/994,792 (now US 11,674,831) and US 18/142,367 (now US 12,529,582).

Important caveats (per my operating rules)

1. I am not asserting that no litigation exists. The absence of hits in these searches is not proof of absence. Free/reverse-searchable coverage of complaint-level filings for this specific patent may be incomplete, and some cases may be sealed or too recent to be indexed.
2. To confirm authoritatively, the following sources should be checked directly (I was unable to retrieve them within this session):
   • PACER — Docket searches in relevant districts (Crisi Medical Systems is headquartered in Florida, so S.D. Fla. / M.D. Fla. would be likely venues).
   • Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (filter by patent number 10782166).
   • USPTO Patent Center / Assignment and PTAB (for any IPR/PGR naming this patent).
   • CourtListener / Docket Alarm / Justia dockets filtering on the patent number.
3. If you want, I can attempt targeted follow-up searches (e.g., by assignee "Crisi Medical Systems, Inc." in PACER-style queries or by the '794/'831 family patents) — but I want to be clear that, on the evidence gathered so far, no litigation involving US 10,782,166 is known. I would rather report that honestly than fabricate case names, numbers, or outcomes.

Would you like me to pursue the follow-up searches noted above?

I'll verify the structured-data finding against live sources before writing the report.

AIA Trial Proceedings — US Patent 10,782,166 ("Flow Sensor System with Absorber")

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 10,782,166: zero (0). Breakdown by status: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied — the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block, sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal API, returns no AIA trial activity, and independent web searches surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming either this patent or its family members.

Defensive posture for a defendant: this is the "no IPR has ever been filed" scenario, not the "patent has been hardened" scenario. All claims remain presumptively valid and wholly untested at the Board. Nothing is canceled, nothing is statutorily estopped, and every invalidity ground — including art and theories that an IPR petition could never raise in the first place — is fully available to you. The absence of any IPR also means no petitioner has ever built the invalidity record you would otherwise inherit for free.

Proceedings on file

None. Per the canonical structured data: "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest."

Because there is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, or Final Written Decision to report, I am not generating the per-proceeding template — inventing proceeding numbers or attributing holdings to non-existent panels is exactly the fabrication this exercise prohibits.

What I searched to corroborate the ODP result

Caveat (stated plainly rather than papered over): an empty ODP result plus empty web results is not metaphysical proof of absence. ODP ingest lags on very recent filings, and a petition filed within the last few weeks could be missing. But there is no affirmative evidence of any AIA proceeding, and the default position you should brief from is "no PTAB activity on file."

Strategic summary

Claim status.

• CANCELED: none.
• SUSTAINED: none — no claim has ever been tested at the Board, so no claim enjoys the extra durability that comes from surviving an FWD. "Sustained" here means "never challenged," which is materially weaker than "challenged and upheld."
• UNTESTED: all claims. Based on the authoritative patent text, the claims divide into two independent clusters: (i) the continuous-tube family under independent claim 1 (flow tube with inlet/outlet + spaced-apart first and second piezo elements + absorber sheath encircling the tube, with dependents reciting the ~6 mm end-fitting spacing, heat-shrinking, adhesive bonding, stainless steel / plastic / PVC / elastomeric sheath materials, annular piezo elements, and the ≥50%/≥60% attenuation-improvement limitations); and (ii) the split-tube family under the second independent claim (first and second flow tubes joined by an absorber sheath "with a gap therebetween," medicament flowing through the sheath, with the ≥60%/≥75% attenuation limitations). Both independents are structurally broad and appear vulnerable to prior-art attack grounded in known ultrasonic flow-measurement and vibration-damping practice — but that is an assessment to test in a petition, not a conclusion you can rely on.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue: it binds only a petitioner, real party in interest, or privy that obtained an institution decision, and no IPR/PGR has ever been instituted. Therefore, for a defendant being asserted against today, nothing is off the table:

• All § 102 and § 103 grounds based on patents and printed publications remain available at the Board and in district court.
• Critically, § 112 written-description/enablement and indefiniteness challenges are fully preserved. IPRs cannot raise § 112, so a defendant who wants to attack the absorber-sheath claim language or the relative attenuation-percentage limitations as indefinite or unsupported by the 96,000-node simulation disclosure must do so in litigation — there is no risk of having "reasonably could have raised" those grounds in a prior IPR.
• System prior art and public-use/on-sale activity remain available, again because no IPR ever narrowed the universe of what "could have been raised."
• Because the patent's family is dense (US 9,970,794; US 10,295,384; US 10,302,473; US 10,514,284; US 11,415,440; US 11,674,831; US 12,529,582, plus EP 3,341,052 B1 and CN counterparts), your freedom-to-operate and invalidity work should treat the siblings as one portfolio problem — knocking out the '166 patent alone may simply route the patent owner to a continuation with effectively the same disclosure.

Pattern signals.

• Same petitioner, multiple IPRs? No — no petitioner at all.
• Patent-owner PTAB appeal aggressiveness? No signal; the patent owner has never been a party to an AIA trial on this patent, and I found no CAFC appeal involving it either. (For completeness: I also could not identify any district-court litigation involving the '166 patent in the prior litigation screen — consistent with, though not proof of, a patent that has never been asserted.)
• Defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.)? No Unified Patents litigation-portal or IPR entry for 10,782,166 appeared. No aggregator is in the chain.

Why the silence matters. Well-asserted medical-device patents of this type — asserted against hospitals' incumbent suppliers or against competing IV-infusion hardware makers — attract IPRs reliably. A zero-IPR history coupled with no identifiable litigation suggests the patent has not been asserted against a well-resourced defendant (or that any assertions settled before a petition ripened). For a defendant receiving a demand letter today, that cuts both ways: there is no ready-made invalidity record to license, but there is also no petitioner-side investment or settlement posture to lean on. You would be the first mover, and you would control the art selection.

Recommended next steps

1. No FWD to link, because none exists. Do not build a defense brief around a PTAB outcome — there is nothing to quote. If opposing counsel asserts that the patent has been "upheld by the PTAB," that statement is unsupported; ask for the proceeding number and confirm it at PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/) before conceding anything.
2. Verify the negative directly before relying on it in a filing. Confirm via:
   • PTAB E2E / PTAB Center search by patent number: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/
   • PTAB decisions archive: https://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html (PTAB Decisions) and the USPTO ODP API trial-proceedings endpoint
   • CourtListener / RECAP docket and opinion search filtered on 10,782,166: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%2210%2C782%2C166%22&type=o
   • Patent Center prosecution and assignment history (confirm the current assignee is still Crisi Medical Systems, Inc., and check for any post-grant review certificate or reexamination under 35 U.S.C. §§ 301–307 filed outside the AIA trial track)
3. Timing, if you elect an IPR. No § 315(b) clock has started because no complaint has been served. Once you are served with a complaint alleging infringement, you have one year from service to petition — and that deadline is statutory and non-extendable. The patent expires (anticipated) 2036-08-25, so there is ample patent life left to justify the spend.
4. Vehicle limitations. A PGR is no longer available — it is only timely within 9 months of grant, and this patent granted 2020-09-22. A CBM is unavailable: the claims are directed to a medical-device fluid sensor, not a financial product or service, and are a "technological invention" under § 18(d)(1) in any event. IPR is your only AIA route, which means your petition must be built on patents and printed publications under § 102/§ 103 — no § 101, no § 112, no system art.
5. Sequencing consideration. Because § 112 and non-publication grounds can only be raised in court, consider whether a district-court invalidity contentions package (indefiniteness of the "improved by at least 50%/60%/75%" attenuation limitations relative to an unstated baseline; enablement of the full sheath-material genus) is worth preserving alongside any IPR strategy — an IPR win on § 103 does not sweep those theories along, and an estoppel-free record is a rare luxury.

Bottom line for the defendant: no IPR has been filed against US 10,782,166, no claim has been canceled or sustained, no petitioner is estopped, and the full invalidity toolkit — including IPR-ineligible § 112 and system-art grounds — is available. The patent is untested, not hardened.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,782,166 through USPTO Assignment Search and cross-reference sources.

Interesting lead — PlainSite shows assignment records with two assignors. Let me dig deeper.

Let me pull the specific assignment records and the PlainSite profile directly.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 10,782,166 B2 ("Flow Sensor System with Absorber")

Analyst note on source access. I was unable to open assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov directly in this session (login-gated SPA). The findings below are assembled from (a) the authoritative Google Patents legal-events feed supplied in the file, which reproduces USPTO assignment events, and (b) PlainSite's mirror of the underlying USPTO Patent Assignment records (which carry reel/frame and correspondent data). Where I could not verify a reel/frame, I say so rather than infer one.

Inventors

Additional recorded assignor — flag as a discrepancy. The PlainSite profile table for Crisi Medical Systems lists, adjacent to the '166 patent entry, an assignor row for Mark Raptis, executed 4/11/2019, paired with "Flow Sensor System with Absorber / 10782166" (plainsite.org/profiles/crisi-medical-systems-inc/). Mark Raptis is not a named inventor on the issued '166 patent (Google Patents lists only DeKalb). Raptis is a prolific Crisi inventor (13 patents, per GoodIP). I cannot reconcile this — the same PlainSite profile table also contains obviously mis-merged third-party records (e.g., "Convertible Travel Bag For Boots," "Novel Road Markings"), so the Raptis/'166 pairing may be a scrape artifact rather than a genuine co-assignment for this application. Do not treat Raptis as an inventor of '166 without confirming the face of the assignment document.

Departure patterns: none discernible. DeKalb and Raptis both appear as assignors on later Crisi family recordings (e.g., reel 50947/0659, recorded 2019-11-07), i.e., they were still executing Crisi assignments in 2019 — no evidence of a within-12-month inventor exodus preceding a fire-sale.

Original assignee

Crisi Medical Systems, Inc. — named on the issued patent as both original and current assignee.

• Address of record: P.O. Box 366, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067 (per USPTO Patent Assignment 50947/0659).
• Line of business: medical device / medication-delivery safety hardware. The '166 specification describes an "intelligent injection port" bolus-tracking system (single-use flow sensor + reusable base with ultrasonic flow measurement, syringe barcode reader, and wireless gateway), consistent with a real product concept rather than a pure paper portfolio.
• Portfolio scale: ~46 granted US patents per PatentsView (PlainPatent), with secondary sources counting ~82 applications; primary CPC A61M (syringe/infusion/dosing safety), plus disinfection-cap and injection-site families (Bochenko, DeKalb, Raptis, Van Veen co-inventors).
• Current status: Active as a patent holder. Google Patents shows the assignee continuing to file family continuations — US 16/994,792 (granted as US 11,674,831) via priority claim dated 2020-08-17, and US 18/142,367 (granted as US 12,529,582) via priority claim dated 2023-05-02 — all still in Crisi's name, with the '166 patent's anticipated expiration listed as 2036-08-25.
• Commercialization: I could not verify a shipping product embodying the claims. Note the entity-profile anomaly (P.O. Box correspondence address; concentrated patent holdings) — but per my operating rules, address-and-name alone is not an NPE finding.

Assignment timeline

Bottom line up front: this chain contains one confirmed, post-filing assignment for the '166 patent itself (inventor → original assignee). No post-issuance transfers, no LLC chains, no aggregator appear in any record I retrieved.

2019-04-11 (executed) / recorded 2019-04-11 — Reel/frame: NOT CONFIRMED

• Conveyance: Assignment (inventor-to-applicant; "Assignment of Assignors Interest" style)
• Assignor: DeKalb, Shawn Wayne
• Assignee: Crisi Medical Systems, Inc.
• Correspondent: not exposed in the legal-events feed; not verified
• Context: Confirmatory assignment executed on/simultaneous with the 2019-04-11 filing of application 16/381,518 — the day-one inventor-to-company conveyance typical of a corporate filing program. Not a sale, not a securitization.

2019-11-07 — Reel 50947/0659

• Conveyance: Assignment — "Assignment Of Assignors Interest"
• Assignors: Dekalb, Shawn Wayne (executed 2016-03-22); Raptis, Mark (executed 2016-11-03)
• Assignee: Crisi Medical Systems, Inc., P.O. Box 366, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067
• Correspondent: THE WINCHESTER LAW FIRM (phone +1 831 427 0546 — 831 = Santa Cruz/Monterey, CA area, matching The Winchester Law Firm's location)
• Context: Long-delayed confirmatory recording of inventor conveyances to the original assignee. Caveat: this record's named property is the sibling application 16/676,867, "Flow Sensor System Including Spring Contacts" (pub. US 2020/0072648), not application 16/381,518. I did not confirm on its face that it also lists the '166 patent as a covered property. Source: plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=9977060

Correspondent recurrence flag: The Winchester Law Firm is the recording correspondent on Crisi's assignment record 50947/0659 and is the firm associated with the Crisi portfolio's prosecution filings. That is a recurrence across the original assignee's own records — it is not a "same lawyer, different shell LLCs" NPE tell, because the assignee is identical throughout. I found no second, unrelated assignee entity in this chain to test the classic repeat-correspondent pattern against.

No further records. I found no assignment, security interest, merger, change-of-name, license, or release recorded against the '166 patent after grant (2020-09-22). The earlier litigation workup on this patent likewise identified no suits, IPR/PGR, or ITC action naming US 10,782,166.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10782166
    2015 : Provisional application filed
    2016 : Non provisional filed
         : Inventor DeKalb assigns rights to Crisi
    2019 : Continuation filed as 16381518
         : Assignment recorded to Crisi Medical Systems
         : Family assignment recorded at reel 50947 0659
    2020 : US 10782166 granted
         : Family continuation filed as 16994792
    2023 : Family continuation filed as 18142367

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate: 0 of 2 strong signals and 0 of 2 weak signals fire.

Verdict

Insufficient data — the record shows only the original assignment, so no NPE pattern can be evidenced.

The sole conveyance touching the '166 chain is the inventor-to-applicant assignment dated/recorded 2019-04-11 (assignor DeKalb, Shawn Wayne → Crisi Medical Systems, Inc., per the Google Patents legal events), paralleled by the family-level recording at reel 50947/0659 recorded 2019-11-07 from inventors DeKalb and Raptis to the same Crisi entity; the original assignee therefore remains the current assignee, and its 2020 and 2023 continuations stayed in its name. There is no post-issuance transfer, no licensing LLC, no known asserter, no cascading chain, no bankruptcy, and no defensive aggregator — so none of the eight tracked signals is supported by a reel/frame.

Diligence caveats / recommended next checks (all in one place):

1. Confirm the '166 patent's own reel/frame. The 2019-04-11 recording's reel/frame was not exposed in the legal-events feed and I could not reach the Assignment Center to read it. Verify at assignmentcenter.uspto.gov using the Assignment Search "Patent Number" field (enter 10782166).
2. Resolve the Mark Raptis anomaly. If the assignment document for 16/381,518 genuinely names Raptis as an assignor alongside DeKalb, that is a notable drafting irregularity worth a paragraph in any FTO opinion; if it is a PlainSite scrape misalignment, discard it.
3. Confirm whether reel 50947/0659 also covers application 16/381,518 or only 16/676,867 — the record's named property is the spring-contacts application.
4. Entity-level check, not chain-level: Crisi Medical Systems, Inc.'s operating status, any state dissolution, and whether any product was ever commercially shipped. That question is about the assignee, not about the assignment chain, and on the evidence I hold, it is unresolved — I am explicitly not asserting Crisi is or is not an NPE.

Verify this chain yourself: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search Patent Number 10782166) — and the assignment record page I relied on: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[9977060](/patent/9977060)

I'll search for the patent's citation records and prior art references.

I hit the tool-step ceiling while trying to pull the (56) References Cited block and the claim set for US 10,782,166 directly. Below is everything I could ground, with explicit confidence flags and the gaps labeled rather than filled in.

1. Patent identification (confirmed from the authoritative text)

Documentation gap I must flag: the full text supplied as authoritative for this patent contains the specification, abstract, and drawing list, but not the (56) References Cited section and not a claim set. The "Definitions" panel in the fetched text reproduces what are plainly the claims verbatim (they match the claim text on JP2018532456A for the same family), so I use that as a reconstruction of the claims — but the claim numbering below is a reconstruction, not a verified record. Treat "Claim 1" as "the absorber-sheath apparatus claim" and "Claim 13-ish" as "the split-tube/gap claim."

Also, a small internal inconsistency in the inputs: the task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while my operating rules state today is 2026-09-29. It does not change any conclusion here; I note it only because I was told not to silently reconcile discrepancies.

2. On obtaining the citation list — what I got and what I could not

Could not complete: a direct USPTO PatentCenter / PATENTSCOPE / Global Dossier query on application 16/381,518, and a direct read of the (56) block on the Google Patents front page for US10782166B2. I attempted these via web search only and exhausted my step budget. I am therefore not in a position to certify "this is the complete citation list for US 10,782,166."

Confirmed datapoint on what '166 cites: the forward-citation list on the EP 0 897 102 B1 publication server record lists US 10,782,166 B2 among the documents citing EP 0 897 102. Google/EPO "Cited by" lists are built from the citing document's own reference list, so US 10,782,166 B2 cites EP 0 897 102 (ultrasonic flowmeter family, published 1999) — that is confirmed, not inferred.
Source: http://data.epo.org/pise-server/rest/collections/lgpi/EP0897102B1.pdf

Best available proxy (explicitly a proxy, lower confidence): US 9,983,034 B2, "Flow Sensor System Including Transmissive Connection," is a same-day sibling (filed 2016-08-25, same specification, same inventor, same assignee). Its front-page (56) block is retrievable in OCR:
Source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/79/bc/64/8091090c929503/US9983034.pdf

Since all applications in this family were filed the same day with the same disclosure and the same counsel (The Webb Law Firm), the IDS content is expected to overlap heavily with '166's. But I have not verified that overlap item-by-item, and '166's own list may be a subset or superset. Every entry below tagged [B] carries that caveat.

One further caution: EP 0 897 102 appears in that same sibling list as a foreign patent document — which is consistent with, and independently corroborates, the confirmed EP-cites-'166 datapoint above.

3. Prior-art / citation inventory

Legend for "Source": [A] = confirmed cited by US 10,782,166; [B] = retrieved from sibling US 9,983,034 B2's (56) list (proxy); [C] = surfaced in search but not confirmed as cited by '166; [F] = same-family document (not prior art).

Dates below are reproduced exactly as the OCR/search returned them (month/year for the U.S. patents; day-level where the source gave it). I did not compute or "correct" any number or date.

U.S. Patent Documents

U.S. Patent Application Publications

Foreign Patent Documents

False leads I ruled out (so they are not mistaken for citations of '166)

• US 4,901,194 A (Steinman) and US 2016/051713 A1 (Robert, Michael E.) and US 8,861,166 B2 (Illinois Tool Works) — these appear in the ISR for PCT/US2018/063253, a different case; no link to '166.
• US 10,258,742; US 10,641,632; US 11,385,086; US 11,927,467 (all Becton, Dickinson and Company) — these cite the Crisi family (they show up as forward citations). They post-date '166 and are therefore not prior art to it. They are useful only as evidence of the technical neighborhood and of BD's continuation strategy around the absorber concept.
• US 11,268,838; US 11,519,768; US 11,596,585; US 11,674,831; US 12,529,582 — all same-family Crisi continuations. Not prior art.

4. §102 analysis — substantive assessment

Governing law/framework. '166 was filed 2019-04-11 but claims priority to 2015-08-28, so it is an AIA first-inventor-to-file case and the critical date for §102(a)(1)/(a)(2) art is 2015-08-28. Anything published on/after that date is out unless it qualifies under §102(a)(2) as an effectively-earlier-filed application, or under the §102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception (relevant since a large block of the surrounding art is commonly owned by Crisi/BD).

Claim 1 (absorber-sheath apparatus claim), reconstructed elements:
(a) flow tube with inlet/outlet and an acoustical transmission rate; (b) first piezo element upstream and second piezo element downstream, mounted apart a pre-selected distance; (c) an absorber sheath encircling the flow tube, having upstream and downstream ends, comprising a material with an acoustical transmission rate different than the flow tube.

Second independent claim (split-tube/gap claim): flow tube sub-assembly with first and second flow tubes each having inlet/outlet and an outside diameter; absorber sheath connecting the first tube's outlet to the second tube's inlet with a gap therebetween, medicament flowing through at least a portion of the absorber sheath; first and second piezo elements mounted apart a pre-selected distance on the sub-assembly.

Dependent features to be accounted for: end fittings with piezo elements mounted to them; absorber ends spaced ~6 mm from the fittings; heat-shrunk sheath; adhered with an acoustically-transparent adhesive; stainless-steel tube; plastic/PVC/elastomeric sheath; attenuation improved by ≥50% (or ≥60%) over a sub-assembly without the absorber; annular piezo elements encircling the tube; housing + reusable base with microprocessor; disposability; and for the gap claim, attenuation improved by ≥60% (or ≥75%).

Anticipation assessment, reference by reference

The two limitations most likely to defeat anticipation

1. "Material with an acoustical transmission rate different than the flow tube." Most ultrasonic-flowmeter art discloses a metal measuring tube with bonded/coupled transducers — not a separate encircling sheath selected for a differing acoustic transmission rate. Absent that disclosure, no single reference anticipates Claim 1.
2. The numerical attenuation limits (≥50%/≥60%; and ≥60%/≥75% for the gap claim). These are result limitations. Anticipation would require the reference to inherently produce that attenuation (In re Oelrich / In re Kulling inherency standard) — a high bar, since the specification ties the numbers to the applicants' own SolidWorks Simulation 2012 study (Tables 1A/1B, ~96,000 nodes, 533 kHz, parabolic tet mesh) and to the specific example cases 2–4 (EPS-300 and MFP heat shrink; 70A Shore silicone at the 2.5 mm anti-node). No reference in the retrieved list appears to quantify attenuation at all.
3. The gap-connecting-sheath claim is structurally unusual (the medicament flows through the sheath bridging a physical gap between two tubes). I found no reference in the retrieved inventory that discloses a split flow tube bridged by a fluid-conducting absorber — that claim looks the most robust of the two independents on the available evidence.

Overall conclusion (stated with its limits)

On the evidence I could actually retrieve, I did not identify any reference among the '166 citation inventory that is demonstrably anticipatory under §102 of the independent claims. The closest single-reference candidates are US 7,882,751 B2 (Hoecker) and US 4,677,858 (Ohnhaus), and in both cases the dispositive limitation — an encircling sheath of a material with an acoustical transmission rate different from the flow tube — is unverified. The most likely challenge posture is §103 (flowmeter architecture from EP 0 897 102 / US 4,677,858 / US 8,544,344, in view of a damping-jacket teaching), not §102.

I want to be explicit about the epistemic status: I have not verified the disclosure of items 1–23 above against their full texts. Element-by-element mapping without reading the reference is guesswork dressed as analysis, and I would rather mark it as such than produce a confident-looking §102 table I cannot support.

5. Recommended next steps to close the gaps

1. Get the actual (56) block. USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) → application 16/381,518 → "References Cited" / IFW, and the EPO Global Dossier for the same application. Conversely, Google Patents' "Patent Citations" panel at https://patents.google.com/patent/US10782166B2/en — I could not render it within this session.
2. Get the verified claim set (same Patent Center record) so the §102 mapping runs against real claim numbers rather than my reconstruction from the "Definitions" panel.
3. Pull full texts for US 7,882,751 B2, US 4,677,858 A, US 8,544,344 B2, US 7,255,006 B2, US 8,904,878 B2 and EP 0 897 102, and check specifically for: (i) any jacket, coating, sleeve, potting, or coupling body about the measuring tube; (ii) any statement of acoustic impedance / transmission-rate mismatch; (iii) attenuation measurement data.
4. Cross-check the sibling's list against '166's to determine whether the [B] proxy items are genuinely in '166's IDS; discard any that are not.

6. Consistency check against the previously generated litigation section

No contradiction. That section reported no litigation identified for US 10,782,166, with an explicit caveat that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My searches likewise surfaced no district-court complaint, ITC action, IPR/PGR, or CAFC appeal naming US 10,782,166 — only unrelated false positives on the number string. The one thing I would add: the patent's forward-citation trail shows a dense Becton Dickinson and Company filing cluster reading on the Crisi absorber family (US 10,258,742; US 10,641,632; US 11,385,086; US 11,927,467) and that Crisi is described in trade press as a BD subsidiary. That is a portfolio-concentration signal, not evidence of litigation, and it should not be reported as litigation.

I'll start by gathering the claim set and the prior-art citations for US 10,782,166, since the authoritative text provided cuts off before the claims and doesn't include the "Citations"/"Similar Documents" tables.

I have the claims and family context now. Let me try to pull the actual cited prior art on the '166 patent's face and the closest ultrasonic-flowmeter damping art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,782,166 B2 ("Flow Sensor System with Absorber")

0. Data-integrity note (read first)

Two gaps materially affect this analysis, and I am flagging them rather than papering over them:

1. The "Prior Art section of this page" was not present in the authoritative text I was given. The supplied Google Patents capture for US 10,782,166 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10782166/en) includes the abstract, definitions, description, figures list, and CPC classifications — but it cuts off before the claims and does not include the "Citations," "Cited By," or "Similar Documents" tables. My searches did not surface the '166 face citations either. So I am not working from the examiner-cited art; I am working from (a) the patent's own admitted background, (b) the sibling-family art disclosed in the specification, and (c) the closest ultrasonic-flowmeter damping/absorber art that my searches actually returned. I mark each reference's date as to be verified against the document face.
2. The verbatim granted claims of US 10,782,166 were not available to me. I reconstructed the two independent-claim families from (i) the "Definitions" block of the authoritative text, which reproduces the summary paragraphs, and (ii) a family-member record for the corresponding EP application ("Flow Sensor System with Absorber," EP 3341052 A1 / application 21187984) that reproduces the claim set with the two-flow-tube independent claim (http://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/pt_document/lens/lens/185-266-983-221-979, https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/185-266-983-221-979/frontpage). Treat the claim language below as a reconstruction, not a certified copy.

No contradiction with the earlier litigation section was found; that section's "no litigation identified" finding is simply orthogonal to § 103.

1. Claim framework

Effective filing / prior-art date: 2015-08-28 (provisional 62/211,309, per the patent's own Cross-Reference and the Google Patents "Prior art date"). Art must therefore pre-date 2015-08-28 (§ 102(a)(1)) or be an application effectively filed before then (§ 102(a)(2)). Note that the post-2015-08-28 Crisi/Becton application WO 2017/219018 ("Method and apparatus for wetting internal fluid path surfaces…," priority 2016-06-17) surfaced in search but is outside the prior-art window for the '166 claims and I do not rely on it.

Independent claim family A (continuous flow tube):

• flow tube with inlet/outlet and an "acoustical transmission rate"; medicament flows through it;
• first piezo element upstream, second downstream, mounted a pre-selected distance apart;
• an absorber sheath encircling the flow tube, having upstream/downstream ends, comprising a material with an acoustical transmission rate different than the flow tube.

Independent claim family B (two tubes + gap):

• first and second flow tubes, each with inlet/outlet and an outside diameter;
• an absorber sheath connecting the first flow tube outlet to the second flow tube inlet with a gap therebetween, medicament flowing through at least a portion of the sheath;
• piezo pair as above.

Dependent features in the record: end fittings with piezo elements mounted to them; sheath ends spaced ~6 mm from the end fittings; sheath heat-shrunk onto the OD; sheath adhered with an acoustically transparent adhesive; stainless steel tube; plastic / PVC / elastomeric sheath; attenuation improved "at least 50%/60%" (family A) or "at least 60%/75%" (family B); annular piezo elements; housing + reusable base containing a microprocessor and circuit; disposable sub-assembly; base reused with a different sub-assembly.

2. Level of ordinary skill (POSITA)

A bachelor's degree in mechanical, electrical, or biomedical engineering (or equivalent) plus 2–3 years of experience designing ultrasonic transit-time flow sensors, fluid-handling medical devices, or acoustic instrumentation; or a master's degree with less experience. This is a routine-mechanical-plus-acoustics combination, and the scope of the prior art is correspondingly broad.

3. Candidate prior art (surfaced by search; dates to be verified)

4. Element-by-element obviousness

4.1 Claim family A — the core absorber-sheath claim

Motivation to combine — the field's own literature supplies it, which is the strongest form of § 103 rationale:

• In a transit-time flowmeter the fluid-borne signal and the structure-borne "ring-around" signal travel between the same two transducers. US 7,624,651 states the problem explicitly: without damping, "the ring-around signal 22 will travel… with little attenuation… and make it very difficult to distinguish the desirable fluid borne component." EP 2,269,010 states that the secondary signals "circumferentially travel[] within the pipe wall."
• US 9,389,108 states the solution explicitly: absorbing the non-fluid paths produced a 10× SNR gain and enabled measurement at 0.2 L/h.
• The medical application supplies an independent, coexisting motivation: the '166 specification itself says the system must resolve bolus volumes as low as 0.4–1.0 mL with ±20% accuracy and has a dead-space under 0.3 mL — i.e., low-flow, small-volume, low-SNR operating conditions. A POSITA optimizing a small-bore (1.0 mm ID) steel flow tube for small boluses has a concrete reason to suppress structure-borne crosstalk along that steel tube.
• Result: combining the conventional piezo-pair flowmeter with an absorptive sheath on the flow tube is the application of a known technique to a known structure, yielding the predictable result (less crosstalk, better SNR) — the KSR "predictable variation" and "known technique, ready for improvement" rationales.

4.2 Dependent claims

4.3 Claim family B — two tubes joined by the absorber sheath with a gap

This family is more exposed, not less. The essential added feature is that the sheath spans a physical gap between the first tube outlet and the second tube inlet, with medicament flowing through the sheath.

• US 7,624,651 teaches exactly the rationale: damp the "structural component… to impede propagation of the structural component to the receiver," while the fluid-borne component passes. A gap in the metal path is the capital-case version of "impede propagation of the structural component."
• EP 2,269,010 teaches a conformable damping member on the conduit wall with feature spacing below the ring-around wavelength — i.e., discrete/interrupting structure rather than a continuous metal path.
• The stated benefit (≥60%, ≥75% improvement) is the predictable consequence of breaking the continuous acoustic path. A POSITA seeking to remove the structure-borne path in a steel tube would readily (a) interrupt the tube, and (b) bridge the interruption with the same flexible, acoustically dissimilar material already being used as the absorber — motivated by the additional requirement that the joint be fluid-tight and carry the medicament (which the sheath, rated as an elastomeric/PVC body, does).
• The "medicament flows through at least a portion of the absorber sheath" limitation effectively requires the sheath to be the fluid conduit across the gap — a design choice following from the gap, using a material already selected for the absorber function.

5. Secondary considerations / rebuttal space

This is where an applicant would have to carry the case, and on the record I have, the objective indicia are weak or unsupported:

1. No evidence of unexpected results in the material available to me. The specification reports simulation attenuation figures (via SolidWorks Simulation 2012, 533 kHz drive, transverse displacement reduction) but provides no comparison against the closest prior art (e.g., vs. an external conformable damper per EP 2,269,010). Demonstrating improvement over the patent's own un-absorbered baseline is not the same as demonstrating unexpectedness over the art.
2. No evidence of the criticality of the numeric thresholds (50/60/75%, 6 mm spacing, 2.4 mm OD / 0.25 mm wall). Without a showing that material outside the range fails, the ranges are optimization, not invention.
3. No commercial-success / licensing / copying evidence with a nexus was identified in the litigation search performed for this matter (none found), and none is presented here.
4. Possible counter-arguments the applicant could raise (flagged for completeness, not endorsed):
   • "Teaching away / balance." One could argue the art either (a) places the damper externally on the pipe wall (EP 2,269,010; JP 2005-195371; US 2004/0123666), not as a flow-conveying sheath, or (b) places the absorber inside the fluid path as the wetted conduit ('108). The '166 family-A claim has the tube and the sheath, with medicament in the tube — arguably a hybrid not squarely disclosed. This is the strongest available non-obviousness thread.
   • "Don't damp the signal you want." An absorber encircling the measurement span risks attenuating the desired signal; the '166 positions the sheath ends away from the fittings where the piezos are mounted. Whether this is a genuine unexpected balance or routine placement is an evidentiary question.
   • "Unpredictable absorption." Acoustic absorption is frequency- and geometry-dependent, so the degree of attenuation is arguably not predictable. But KSR cautions against demanding predictability of degree for a claimed approach whose structure is known; and the specification's own language ("any polymers or elastomers," "can be similar to or the same as") undercuts an argument of careful selection.

On the record available, the prima facie case of obviousness is strong for both claim families, with the strongest invalidity position being family A (absorber sheath encircling a continuous tube of different acoustic transmission) over US 9,389,108 in view of US 7,624,651 or EP 2,269,010, and family B over the same combination further in view of Anon… — more precisely, family B is met by the same combination read with EP 2,269,010's conformable damping-member teaching and US 7,624,651's explicit "impede propagation of the structural component" rationale, plus routine mechanical skill for the fluid-tight gap.

6. Bottom line and confidence

Confidence caveats, stated plainly:

• I do not have the granted claims verbatim, nor the '166 face citations, nor the prosecution history (including whether the examiner applied any of the references above, and whether any Rule 132 declaration was filed on the attenuation figures). My claim family A/B reconstruction comes from the summary paragraphs and a family-member claim record and should be verified against the certified copy before this analysis is used in a filing.
• The references above were located via search snippets; their publication/priority dates, reporter citations, and exact paragraphs must be verified on each document face before quoting paragraph numbers or asserting pre-2015-08-28 status. I especially flag US 9,541,431 and US 9,389,108, whose exact priority dates I inferred rather than confirmed.
• I did not rely on WO 2017/219018 (Becton Dickinson, priority 2016-06-17) because it post-dates the 2015-08-28 prior-art date. If the '166's effective filing date were ever shown to be later than 2015-08-28 (e.g., if the provisional were held not to support the absorber claims), that reference and others would come into play and would strengthen the § 103 case further.

If you can supply the certified claim set and the Google Patents "Citations" table for US 10,782,166, I can convert this framework into a formal, paragraph-cited claim chart.