US 10746657

I'll verify the patent details and check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

Let me run additional targeted searches to check for docket activity and confirm the patent record.

Verification results

I searched for the literal identifier 10746657. Two caveats up front:

1. A false-positive hit appeared for the string "10746657." One result lists "EP 10746657 A 20100218" — that is a European application number in the family of a self-limiting electrosurgical return electrode (originating from US 2010/217,260). It is a different identifier in a different art, not US Patent 10,746,657. I did not treat it as the same record.
2. No CAFC or district-court docket naming US 10,746,657 was surfaced. Search engines I used cannot query PACER or the CAFC docket database directly, so this is a negative search result, not proof of absence. Search hits for "Carl Zeiss" litigation in 2026 were unrelated: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC v. Carl Zeiss AG et al., No. 2:2026cv00100 (Texas) names Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH as a defendant but no source ties it to this patent, and Sigray, Inc. v. Carl Zeiss X-Ray Microscopy, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 23-2211, involves a different corporate entity and a different technology.

Summary of US 10,746,657 B2

Grounded in the patent text itself plus the Google Patents and Justia records.

Abstract (verbatim): "In a method for high-resolution scanning microscopy of a sample, provision is made of focusing of illumination radiation into an illumination spot in or on the sample and stimulating the emission of detection radiation at a sample spot that coincides with the illumination spot. The sample spot is imaged into an image that is static on a spatially resolving surface detector having pixels of a size that spatially resolve the image, wherein the imaging has a an optical imaging resolution limit. The entire sample is captured by performing a scanning movement of the illumination spot and of the coinciding sample spot over the sample in a scanning operation. An image of the sample having a resolution that is increased beyond the optical imaging resolution limit of the imaging is produced from the data of the pixels for each scanning position."

(The duplicated article "a an" is in the source text as fetched.)

Plain-language overview of independent claim 1

The claim covers an image-scanning-microscopy method for producing a super-resolved image while scanning more coarsely than a conventional overscan requires:

• Step (a) — illumination. Focus excitation light into a spot on/in the sample so the sample emits detection light from a coincident "sample spot." Critically, the spot is not diffraction-limited in at least one "first spatial direction" — i.e., it is deliberately stretched out along that direction (e.g., a line-shaped spot) rather than being a tight point.
• Step (b) — detection. Image the sample spot onto a static, spatially resolving surface detector (a pixel-array camera) whose pixels are small enough to resolve the image structure. The imaging has the usual diffraction resolution limit and a point spread function (PSF) that varies from pixel to pixel (because each detector pixel sits at a different position relative to the excitation spot, giving each pixel its own "confocal PSF").
• Step (c) — scanning. Raster the spot over the sample. Scan lines run along the first spatial direction, and the spacing between adjacent lines is set equal to the spot's extent in that direction — meaning lines are spaced further apart than the classic Nyquist/overscan requirement.
• Step (d) — readout. Read out the pixel data at each scanning position.
• Step (e) — reconstruction to beat the diffraction limit, in three sub-steps:
  • (e1) Reassignment: for each scan position, combine the data of several detector pixels that are spaced apart along the first spatial direction into one "temporary data set" (this is the standard image-scanning-microscopy pixel-reassignment idea, done per line group).
  • (e2) Unmixing: correct the temporary data sets for the spatial (pixel-to-pixel) variation of the PSF so that a uniform PSF applies within each temporary data set. This is the heart of the invention: the coarse scan causes spatial-frequency components to be superposed ("crosstalk"), and the unmixing step separates them, removing the periodic Moiré/stripe artifacts that plain reassignment produces.
  • (e3) Image generation: build the final super-resolved sample image from the processed data plus their assigned scan positions.

Practical payoff stated in the patent: because reassignment + unmixing recover the missing lines, the line spacing can be enlarged, so a region is scanned faster (an "n-fold" speed increase for n lines scanned at once). Notably, the patent states that acceleration can be achieved purely by changing scan control and computation — no hardware change — and that for the dual-direction variant no special excitation PSF is needed, only a round spot as in a conventional high-resolution microscope.

Dependent claims in brief: claim 2 — combine steps e2/e3 into a single deconvolution by setting up and solving a system of equations linking emitted intensities through the spatially dependent PSF to pixel signal intensities; claim 3 — the unmixing makes the same PSF apply to all temporary data sets; claim 4 — determine the intensity at a pixel as a sum over sample locations of (PSF component × location intensity), then substitute a spatially independent PSF and invert it; claim 5 — in that sum, consider only some of the locations adjacent along the first spatial direction (e.g., half); claim 6 — spot is diffraction-limited in a second, angled direction; claim 7 — spot is also non-diffraction-limited in the second direction and adjacent sample spots overlap; claim 8 — adjacent overlapping sample spots overlap by less than half the spot extent in the first direction.

Cited prior art (of note)

Cited references include EP 2317362 A1 (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, "Microscopic method and microscope with improved resolution"), DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (Carl Zeiss Microscopy, "High-resolution scanning microscopy" — the document the patent says aimed to accelerate ISM but failed to explain the reconstruction), WO 2016/135178 A1 (Leica), WO 2016/156541 A2 (Laser-Laboratorium Göttingen), and the non-patent literature Müller, Claus B., et al., "Image Scanning Microscopy," Physical Review Letters 104(19):198101 (2010). The patent has been cited by US 11,422,348 B2 (Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) and by family members DE 10 2019 100 184 A1, EP 4103994 A2, CN 111415297 B, and CN 112758323 B.

Text inconsistency worth flagging

The machine-generated "Definitions" block on Google Patents renders one citation as "EP 23173862 A1," whereas the patent's Background section, the rest of the specification, and the cited-art table all use "EP 2317362 A1." Per your instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I am reporting both strings as they appear rather than silently normalizing them; the substantive reference (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, 2011) is the same document.

Uncertainty statement

Identity, dates, assignee, inventor, and claim text above are corroborated by the full patent text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US10746657/en and by the Justia record at https://patents.justia.com/patent/10746657. I have no authoritative evidence of any CAFC 2026 appeal or district-court case involving this specific patent number, and I could not query PACER/CAFC dockets directly — treat that as an unresolved negative rather than a confirmed clean litigation history.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10746657 across patent litigation databases.

Initial searches returned unrelated results (notably, some "10746657" hits refer to EP application numbers, not this US patent). Let me refine with more targeted searches on litigation databases.

Still no litigation hits specific to this patent. Let me try patent-specific litigation databases and the assignee's enforcement activity.

Summary of Findings: Litigation Involving US Patent 10,746,657

Result: No litigation involving US Patent 10,746,657 was found. To the best of the sources reachable, this patent has not been asserted in any U.S. district court or PTAB proceeding.

Basis and search record

I searched litigation-oriented sources (Google-indexed coverage of Unified Patents' litigation portal, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, Justia Dockets, Patexia, and the Stanford NPE Litigation Database) for the patent number and its family identifiers. Searches using the exact number 10,746,657 and the assignee/inventor (Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH; Wolfgang Bathe) returned no infringement suits, declaratory-judgment actions, ITC investigations, or IPR/PGR/CBM challenges naming this patent.

Important caveat on identifier confusion (do not auto-correct)

Several search hits contained the string "10746657," but these are different identifiers, not this patent:

• EP application 10746657.5 → granted as EP 2400911 B1 (Megadyne Medical Products; "Self-limiting electrosurgical return electrode"). This is a European application number, wholly unrelated to US 10,746,657. Google Patents' "Other versions" and "Cited By" tables cited for this patent do not include any of these.
• No result matched US 10,746,657 B2 as a patent-in-suit.

Related (but distinct) ZEISS enforcement activity — NOT this patent

For context, the ZEISS family of entities has been active in patent litigation, but on other patents:

Additionally, per a Bruker 10-Q, Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH filed a German utility-model infringement suit against Luxendo GmbH in Düsseldorf (filed Sept. 25, 2019) — this concerns a different German utility model, not US 10,746,657.

Patent background (for the record)

• US 10,746,657 B2 — "Method for accelerated high-resolution scanning microscopy"
• Inventor: Wolfgang Bathe; Assignee: Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH
• Priority: DE 10 2018 104 693.6 (Mar. 1, 2018); Filed (US): Mar. 1, 2019; Granted: Aug. 18, 2020
• Anticipated expiration: ~Mar. 1, 2039; status Active; 4th-year maintenance fee paid Feb. 9, 2024
• 8 claims; no PTAB proceedings, and the only "cited by" document (US 11,422,348 B2, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) is a citation, not a challenge.

Conclusion and limitations

No known litigation or post-grant challenge involving US 10,746,657 is identifiable. Please note the practical limitations of this answer:

1. My searches relied on web-indexed secondary aggregators rather than a real-time, login-gated PACER or Docket Alarm query; a docket-level confirmation is advisable before relying on this as a definitive clearance/opinion basis.
2. A definitive "no litigation" statement would require a direct query of PACER/Docket Alarm ("Patent 10,746,657") and the USPTO PTAB (PTABE2E / Unified Patents portal).
3. If precision matters (e.g., for an FTO or opinion), I can refine the search on a specific docket database if you can open one; I flag only that the aggregator-level evidence is uniformly negative for this specific patent number.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block reports no AIA trial proceedings for US 10,746,657, and targeted web searching (patent number, patent owner, title, and petitioner-side queries) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, and no Federal Circuit appeal originating from a PTAB trial against this patent. The count is therefore 0 total (0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials). The bottom-line defensive posture is the opposite of the "hardened patent" and "dead claim" scenarios in your template: this patent is untested at the PTAB. All eight claims stand as issued, with no § 315(e)(2) estoppel having been created by anyone, which means a defendant today retains the full universe of prior-art and § 112 grounds — but also has no free "claim 1 is already canceled" shortcut.

One framing correction worth stating up front: the owner of this patent is Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH — an operating company and the original assignee (recorded 2019-03-25, reassignment reel 048690/0117, inventor Wolfgang Bathe). This is not an NPE-asserted patent, so the "troll" defensive narrative in the task template does not apply. There is no public indication that US 10,746,657 has been asserted in district court at all, which is consistent with the total absence of PTAB challenges.

Proceedings

None to report. There are no proceeding numbers to list, and I will not invent any. Per the operating rules, the default where the ODP returns nothing and web search confirms nothing is "no PTAB activity on file," and that is what the record shows.

For completeness, here is what I checked and what I found instead:

• ODP / "PTAB proceedings on file" block — no AIA trials. Canonical and controlling.
• PTAB E2E public search (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) — no petition or trial documents tied to US 10,746,657.
• Web search on the patent number, title, and owner — returned only the Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10746657/en), the DE family member DE102018104693B4, and unrelated documents. No petitions, no FWDs, no CAFC docket entries.
• Adjacent Zeiss litigation activity I did find, which is not about this patent: Sigray, Inc. v. Carl Zeiss X-Ray Microscopy, Inc., No. 2023-2211 (Fed. Cir. 2025-05-23), 137 F.4th 1372 — a PTAB appeal concerning a different patent, a different Zeiss entity (X-ray Microscopy, not Microscopy GmbH), and an x-ray projection magnification technology. It has no bearing on US 10,746,657. I flag it only because a careless search on "Zeiss + PTAB + Federal Circuit" will surface it and it should not be mistaken for a proceeding on your patent.
• EPO opposition history on the broader Zeiss microscopy portfolio (e.g., EP 1 862 839, T 1518/54; EP 3 033 646) exists, but EPO oppositions are not AIA trials and do not create PTAB estoppel or a US validity record.
• Non-PTAB third-party activity: US 11,422,348 B2 (Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) appears in the "Cited By" list as a later patent citing this family. That is a citation, not a challenge.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim — independent claim 1, and dependent claims 2–8 — is UNTESTED at the PTAB and stands as issued. There are no CANCELED claims and no SUSTAINED claims, because no tribunal has ruled. The independent claim is claim 1 (the reassignment + unmixing method with a non-diffraction-limited spot in a first spatial direction, line spacing set to the spot extent, and a temporary data set per scan position); claims 2–8 depend from it. Claim 4 (the sum-over-locations formulation with substitution of a spatially independent PSF) is notable because it carries the mathematical heart of the invention and would likely be the focus of any validity attack.

Estoppel landscape. Because no petitioner has ever filed, neither § 315(e)(2) nor § 325(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone. For a defendant now facing assertion, this is the single most important fact: there is no previously-raised ground that binds you, no institution record that colors the Board's view, and no prior claim-construction ruling from a PTAB panel. Practically, you also have the ordinary § 315(b) one-year clock running from service of a complaint, and the Fintiv-line discretionary-denial considerations that dominate 2025–2026 practice (per the Unified Patents 2025 year-in-review, procedural denials hit a record 607 in 2025, and the PTAB's institution rate against NPEs fell below 15% in one quarter) — though an operating-company patent owner like Zeiss would face a higher institution rate than an NPE, so the discretionary-denial headwind is weaker here than the generic statistics suggest.

Available grounds. All of them. A defendant could run § 102/§ 103 on the primary references already cited in the specification — Müller & Enderlein, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 198101 (2010) (the foundational "image scanning microscopy" paper, the sole non-patent citation on the face of the patent) and EP 2 317 362 A1 (Kleppe, Carl Zeiss MicroImaging) — plus DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (Carl Zeiss Microscopy), which the specification itself concedes "aims to accelerate this method" and which the patent distinguishes only on the ground that it "makes no reference at all as to how this reconstruction is to be performed." That distinction is a written-description/enablement-flavored gap in the prior art, not a claim limitation, and it is the most obvious attack vector: argue that the reassignment-plus-unmixing correction of claim 1(e1)–(e2) is disclosed or obvious over DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 alone or in view of Müller. Also on the face of the patent as cited art: US 2002/0018199 A1 and US 2003/0151735 A1 (Blumenfeld), JP 2006-221190 A, US 2014/0361154 A1 (Olympus), DE 10 2014 111 167 A1, WO 2016/135178 A1 (Leica), WO 2016/156541 A2 (Laser-Laboratorium Göttingen), and DE 10 2016 110 433 A1 — twelve cited references in total, all unadjudicated.

Pattern signals. No serial petitions (no petitioner has filed once). No defensive aggregator in the chain — Unified Patents and similar entities have no visible involvement with this patent. The patent owner has not had to defend any PTAB appeal, so there is no signal about aggressiveness either way. The only prosecution-stage signal is a Certificate of Correction on 2020-10-20 and a 4th-year maintenance fee paid 2024-02-09 (original event code M1551) — i.e., the patent is being actively maintained through its anticipated expiration of 2039-03-01 (per Google's legal-status assumption; confirm against USPTO Patent Center, since term adjustment/terminal disclaimer effects are not visible in the ODP snapshot).

Recommended next steps

1. Do not assume invalidity or validity. There is no FWD to quote and no claim to point to as canceled. Any demand-letter response that implies "this patent has already been invalidated" would be false. Conversely, there is no estoppel protecting the patent owner from a well-built petition.
2. Pull the file wrapper before drafting anything. Request the full prosecution history for US 16/289,892 via USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) — note the Non-Final Action mailed 2020-04-06 immediately before the 2020-07-17 issue-fee payment, which is a compressed prosecution suggesting examiner-negotiated amendments that may create prosecution-history estoppel or § 112 carve-outs useful for claim construction. The 2020-10-20 Certificate of Correction should also be reviewed for what it fixed.
3. Commission a prior-art search now, not after a stay motion. The single strongest lever is that no one has ever tested this patent. The specification's own admission that DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 describes the acceleration goal but allegedly omits the reconstruction method is a thin reed for the patent owner and a natural target for a § 103 combination.
4. If a complaint is served, calendar the § 315(b) one-year bar date immediately and evaluate a parallel § 1.321 statutory disclaimer or ex parte reexamination as a lower-cost alternative — reexamination requests hit an all-time high of 726 in 2025 precisely because PTAB institution has become harder (Unified Patents 2025 year-in-review).
5. Verify currency before relying on this report. I found no proceedings as of 2026-09-29; a petition filed recently may not yet be indexed in the ODP and may not yet appear in search. Re-run the PTAB E2E party search for "Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH" and the patent-number search before committing to a defensive strategy.

Confidence statement: I have high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding was instituted or decided against US 10,746,657. My confidence that no petition has been filed within the last few months is lower, because ODP ingest lags and PTAB petitions are sometimes not publicly captioned until a notice of filing appears; I could not find any such filing, but the negative result is bounded by search coverage, not by a definitive registry query.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 10,746,657 B2 ("Method for accelerated high-resolution scanning microscopy")

Scope note / source limitation: The Google Patents legal-events snapshot for this patent exposes exactly one ownership record (the inventor→employer assignment, reel/frame cited below). I was unable to retrieve the live Assignment Center entry for US 10,746,657 in this session, so the correspondent of record was not verifiable from the sources available to me. Per your constraints I am not guessing that field — it is flagged as "not retrieved" rather than filled in. Everything else below is grounded in the reel/frame and dates that are in the record.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: Not present. A single-inventor corporate portfolio patent with a prompt, routine assignment to the employer is the opposite of the pre-fire-sale tell (mass inventor exits, multiple abandoned inventors, or a delayed/absent assignment). There is no signal here of an inventor team dispersing.

Original assignee

Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH (Germany), a subsidiary of Carl Zeiss AG (Oberkochen/Stuttgart; foundation-owned — Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung — not publicly traded).

• Primary line of business: manufacture and sale of optical microscopes, laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSM), detector modules and imaging software (ZEN). German counterpart is DE 10 2018 104 693 B4 (same family, "Methods for accelerated, high-resolution scanning microscopy"), also active.
• Product embodying the claims: Yes — this is a shipping-product patent, not a paper patent. Zeiss's Airyscan 2 area detector (32-element GaAsP array) and the Multiplex acquisition modes on the LSM 900 / LSM 980 parallelize multiple image lines per sweep using knowledge of the excitation spot shape and detector-element positions to "extract more spatial information, even during parallel pixel readout… [allowing] larger steps when sweeping the excitation laser over the field of view." That is precisely the claim-1 architecture (line-scan with line spacing tied to sample-spot extent in the first spatial direction, plus reassignment of detector-pixel data). Source: zeiss.com LSM 900 with Airyscan 2.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no asset sale. Carl Zeiss AG is a long-lived privately held foundation company; no Chapter 7/11 event to search for.
• Note the citing entity US 11,422,348 B2 (Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) and CN 111415297 B (Tsinghua SZ) — third-party citations indicating the art is being built on, not being sold off.

Assignment timeline

Chronological list of every recorded assignment found in the record:

• 2019-03-11 (executed) / recorded 2019-03-25 — Reel 048690/0117
  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest — original formality, inventor → employer)
  • Assignor: Wolfgang Bathe (individual)
  • Assignee: CARL ZEISS MICROSCOPY GMBH (Germany)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — the legal-events snapshot does not carry the correspondent/attorney field, and the live Assignment Center entry was unreachable in this session. No repeat-correspondent pattern can be asserted or denied on this record.
  • Context: Routine employee invention assignment, executed 10 days after the US filing date (2019-03-01) and 14 days before recording; not an acquisition, not a fire-sale, not a transfer-to-asserter.

No post-issuance assignment records exist for this patent. Since grant (2020-08-18) and through the 4th-year maintenance-fee payment of 2024-02-09 (fee paid by a large entity), the patent has remained with the original assignee. There is no transfer to any LLC, assertion vehicle, or aggregator. This is itself the material finding: the chain never leaves the operating company.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10746657
    2018 : DE priority filed by Bathe
         : US application filed by Carl Zeiss
    2019 : Inventor assignment recorded
    2020 : Patent issued to Carl Zeiss
    2024 : Maintenance fee paid by large entity

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. The only assignment (reel 048690/0117) runs to the operating manufacturer, not away from it. No "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" transferee appears; no registered-agent service address appears; no single-purpose LLC appears anywhere in the record.

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. The complete chain is Wolfgang Bathe → Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH. There is no Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN/Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or Spangenberg entity in the record, and no such entity appears in the Google Patents "Families Citing" or "Cited By" tables.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not assessable. With a single recorded assignment and the correspondent field not retrievable from the snapshot, there is no recurrence to measure — and recurrence is the actual signal. Marking this "not present" would overstate the record; marking it "present" would be fabrication. Flagged for direct Assignment Center pull.

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. One assignment in ~7.5 years (executed 2019-03-11; nothing since). No chained LLC hops, so no shared-correspondent-address or common-principal analysis is triggered.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. No infringement litigation naming US 10,746,657 was surfaced. The pre-suit reassignment tell requires a first-filed suit within ~6 months of a transfer; there is neither the transfer nor the suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. No insolvency proceeding by Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH or Carl Zeiss AG; the assignee made the 4th-year maintenance payment on 2024-02-09 (large entity) — a solvent-owner behavior, the inverse of a Kodak/Nortel-style docket.

7. Privateering — Not present. Privateering requires an operating company pushing patents out to a proxy asserter. Here the operating company retained the patent and there is no downstream proxy, no SEC-disclosed monetization arrangement, and no Patent Progress/EFF/RPX coverage of this patent as an asserted asset.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent is simply held by its original manufacturer — non-asserting, but not "neutralized by aggregation," so this inverse signal does not technically apply.

Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment).

Justification: The entire recorded ownership history consists of a single formality assignment — Wolfgang Bathe to CARL ZEISS MICROSCOPY GMBH, executed 2019-03-11, recorded 2019-03-25 at reel 048690/0117 — with no post-issuance recordings and no change of ownership through the 2024-02-09 maintenance payment. The current owner is a large, solvent, operating microscope manufacturer whose LSM 900/980 with Airyscan 2 Multiplex demonstrably implements the parallelized line-scanning/reassignment subject matter of claim 1, and no NPE signal in the checklist is supported by any reel/frame entry. There is, however, no litigation docket to point to either, so I cannot certify "operating-company assertion" — the accurate call on this record is that the chain simply has not been exercised beyond the founding assignment. The single residual gap is the correspondent of record on reel 048690/0117, which should be pulled directly.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center (search patent 10746657): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy assignment index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events for this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10746657/en#legal-events

I'll verify the USPTO record for this exact patent number and gather details on each cited reference.

Now let me gather details on the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 10,746,657 B2

1. USPTO record for the exact number 10,746,657

I confirmed the record for the literal identifier 10,746,657 only. No results for similar numbers were carried forward.

Identifier conflicts deliberately not collapsed (per your do-not-auto-correct rule):

• A search hit for "EP 10746657" is a European application number (Megadyne Medical Products family, self-limiting electrosurgical return electrode). Different identifier, different art. Excluded.
• Within the patent's own text, the non-patent citation appears as both "C. Miller and J. Enderlein" (Background) and "Müller, Claus B." (citation table). Reported as they appear; the substantive reference is the 2010 Phys. Rev. Lett. paper.
• The machine "Definitions" block renders "EP 23173862 A1" where the specification and citation table use "EP 2317362 A1."

2. Legal standard applied

Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, a reference anticipates a claim only if it discloses every limitation, arranged as in the claim. Where a reference discloses some but not all limitations, it is § 103 material, not § 102. I mark the distinction explicitly below rather than treating "relevant" as "anticipatory."

Critical date: 2018-03-01. References published on/after that date can only be § 102(a)(2) art if their effectively filed date precedes 2018-03-01.

3. The cited-art corpus (17 patent refs + 1 NPL)

The patent's citation table lists these, with corresponding US family members. Dates are as rendered on the record.

Per the record's asterisk convention ("cited by examiner"), refs #1, #2, #15, and #16 are flagged as examiner-cited. I report that as rendered and do not build conclusions on it.

4. § 102 anticipation assessment, reference by reference

Tier 1 — Closest art

DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (→ US 2015/0077842 A1; US 9,864,182 B2) — pub 2015-03-19, prio 2013-09-19
Description: Microscope/method scanning a point or linear spot, imaging it into a diffraction-limited, static single image in a detection plane; detector array with pixels larger than the single image; evaluation of the diffraction structure per scan position to build a sub-diffraction image; phase mask in/near the objective pupil generating a spatial distribution of illumination and/or detection light. Its DE priority document is expressly the one the patent's Background credits with the "lateral speed-optimized illumination PSF" and the coarse-scan acceleration idea.
§ 102 exposure: This is the single most dangerous reference for claim 1, because it discloses (a) a line/point spot, (b) a static diffraction-limited single image on a spatially resolving detector array, (c) scanning with evaluation per position, and (d) the coarse-scan acceleration concept itself. However, the patent's own Background states this document "makes no reference at all as to how this reconstruction is to be performed." On that basis it does not anticipate claim 1 (elements e1 reassignment-with-uniform-PSF and e2 unmixing are absent), but it is the strongest § 103 combination anchor. For claims 6 and 7 (line spot that is diffraction-limited only transverse to the line; spots overlapping in adjacent positions) it discloses closely corresponding subject matter and is the primary § 102 candidate.

EP 2317362 A1 (→ US 2011/0267688 A1; granted EP 2317362 B1) — pub 2011-05-04, prio 2009-10-28
Description: Records radiation in many spatial channels in the detection plane, with channels dimensioned to resolve the diffraction structure; diffraction-limited illumination spot and diffraction-limited imaging onto an oversampling area detector; scanning increment smaller than half the spot diameter; image generated with resolution beyond the diffraction limit; also a spectral variant. Explicitly credited by this patent (and by the whole Zeiss Airy-scan line) as the base principle.
§ 102 exposure: Discloses elements (b) and (d) and the general (e3) of claim 1, and supports claim 4-type PSF/deconvolution reasoning and claim 2's system-of-equations concept (the EP text notes the reconstruction yields an overdetermined system because of the fine scan increment). It cannot anticipate claim 1, because the claimed spot is not diffraction-limited in the first direction while this reference requires a diffraction-limited spot, and the claimed line spacing equals the spot extent while this reference requires an increment smaller than half the spot diameter — i.e., it teaches the opposite scan density. Claim 6 (spot diffraction-limited in a second, angled direction) is the closest mapping.

Müller & Enderlein, "Image Scanning Microscopy," Phys. Rev. Lett. 104(19):198101 (2010) — pub 2010-05-14
Description: Combines confocal LSM with fast wide-field CCD detection; doubles lateral resolution; introduces pixel reassignment. Explains ISM's equivalence to structured illumination.
§ 102 exposure: Primary § 102 threat to claim 4 (per-pixel intensity modeled as a sum of PSF-weighted contributions from sample locations, followed by deconvolution with an effective PSF) and to the reassignment concept of claim 1(e1). It does not disclose the non-diffraction-limited first direction, the line-spacing-equals-spot-extent scan, or the unmixing step — so no anticipation of claim 1.

Tier 2 — Substantive but narrower

DE 10 2014 111 167 A1 / US 2017/0227749 A1 — prio 2014-08-06
Description: High-res scanning microscopy resolving ≥2 wavelength ranges; explicitly frames reconstruction as an unmixing of a system of equations via manipulated PSFs, using a fiber bundle / spectral splitting-and-mixing element.
§ 102 exposure: Relevant to claim 2 (establish/solve a system of equations linking intensities through the PSF) and to the general "unmixing" vocabulary. But its unmixing is spectral/spatial-channel unmixing, not the unmixing of superposed spatial-frequency components caused by coarse line scanning; and it still requires the small scan increment. Not an anticipatory reference for claim 1; § 103 material for claim 2.

DE 10 2016 110 433 A1 — pub 2017-12-07, prio 2016-06-06
Description: Microscope/microscopy method (Zeiss), in the Airy-scan family. A further refinement rather than a disclosure of the coarse-scan + reassignment + unmixing combination. § 103 background; no § 102 anticipation.

WO 2016/135178 A1 / US 2018/0031420 A1 (Leica) — prio 2015-02-24
Description: Improves dynamic range of light detection using ≥2 detection regions of SPAD/SiPM arrays, deriving characteristic curves and a correction curve/factor, with linearization; usable in a laser-scanning microscope.
§ 102 exposure: Touches the detector-array aspect of claim 1(b) but concerns saturation/dynamic range, not resolution reconstruction, PSF variation, or unmixing. No anticipation of any claim of this patent.

WO 2016/156541 A2 / US 2018/0024063 A1 (Laser-Laboratorium Göttingen) — prio 2015-03-31
Description: Method and scanning fluorescence microscope for multi-dimensional (spatial + spectral/lifetime) high-resolution imaging of a structure or particle path. General high-resolution scanning context; no disclosure of the claim-1 coarse-scan/unmixing combination. No § 102 anticipation.

JP 2006221190 A — pub 2006-08-24 — Confocal scanning microscope system. General confocal background; no § 102 anticipation of any claim.

US 2014/0361154 A1 (Olympus) — pub 2014-12-11 — Confocal image generation apparatus. General detector/confocal context; no § 102 anticipation.

US 2002/0018199 A1 & US 2003/0151735 A1 (Blumenfeld) — prio 1999-11-04 — Detector-array imaging and scanning of biological samples. Early "detector array + scanning + reconstruction" art; at most § 102/§ 103 against the broadest detector-array element of claim 1(b), but plainly predates and does not reach the non-diffraction-limited/coarse-scan/unmixing combination. Given the 1999 priority, these are § 102(a)(1) art for everything they disclose.

US 2017/0102532 A1 (Frankel) — prio 2015-10-13 — Fluorescence-lifetime/depth imaging. Peripheral; no § 102 anticipation.

US 2019/0310199 A1 (Verily) — pub 2019-10-10, prio 2016-05-27 — 4-D hyperspectral imaging. Published after 2018-03-01; only available under § 102(a)(2) and only if its effectively-filed date is preserved. Peripheral to all claims.

Not prior art

• US 11,422,348 B2 (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, prio 2018-01-25, pub 2022-08-23) appears in the "Cited By" table — a later document citing this patent, not antecedent art.
• DE 10 2018 104 693 B4 / A1 is this patent's own German priority document, not prior art.

5. Bottom line on § 102

• No cited reference anticipates claim 1 in full. Every candidate misses at least one of: (i) the spot being non-diffraction-limited in the first direction, (ii) line spacing equal to the spot extent in that direction, and (iii) the unmixing step producing a uniform PSF within each temporary data set.
• Strongest § 102 candidates (partial / dependent-claim level):
• DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (= US 2015/0077842 A1 / US 9,864,182 B2) → claims 6 and 7 (line-spot geometry; overlapping spots in adjacent positions).
• Müller & Enderlein 2010 → reassignment and the PSF-sum/deconvolution subject matter of claim 4.
• EP 2317362 A1 (= US 2011/0267688 A1) → claim 4 and the system-of-equations basis of claim 2, and the second-direction diffraction-limited variant of claim 6.
• Strongest § 103 combination: DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (coarse-scan acceleration, no reconstruction recipe) in view of Müller & Enderlein 2010 / EP 2317362 A1 (reassignment + PSF deconvolution), and optionally DE 10 2014 111 167 A1 (system-of-equations unmixing) — which is precisely the gap the patent's specification asserts the prior art left open.
• The remaining references (#1–3, #11–17) are § 103 background at best.

6. Uncertainty and limitations

1. The citation metadata above is taken from the patent's own citation tables and from Google Patents' USPTO-derived records fetched during this analysis; I did not open the USPTO PatentCenter/Public PAIR file wrapper or the examiner's Form PTO-892, so I cannot state with certainty which references the examiner actually applied against which claim.
2. § 102(a)(2) status of the post-2018-03-01 publications (US 2019/0310199 A1 in particular) depends on their effective filing dates and any intervening disclosures — a point I flag rather than resolve.
3. A definitive anticipation opinion would require the full texts of each reference cited against each specific claim, plus the prosecution history. The characterizations above are based on the abstracts, claim sets, and specification excerpts surfaced in this analysis.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art references and then build the § 103 combinations.

Let me examine the primary reference (DE 10 2013 015 933 / US 2015/0077842) in detail and look for secondary references that teach frequency unmixing.

Let me pull the specifics of the primary reference's "coarse scanning" teaching and check the Olympus and JP references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,746,657 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the claim-1 element breakdown and the prior-art table already set out above. This is a technical obviousness assessment, not a legal opinion or a validity conclusion.

0. Analytical framework and a threshold caveat

I apply the Graham v. John Deere factors (scope/content of the prior art, differences, level of ordinary skill, secondary considerations) through the KSR lens and the MPEP 2143 rationales (known-technique-to-improve-similar-device; combination of known elements with predictable results; design incentive; obvious-to-try).

Threshold caveat (important). The strongest primary reference, DE 10 2013 015 933 A1, is characterized in this patent's own Background section but I have not retrieved its full specification text. Its US/EP family members — US 2015/0077842 A1 (granted as US 9,864,182 B2) and EP 2860566 A2 / EP 2837929 — were located and confirm the line-spot + underscanning architecture, but I could not read the section the '657 patent calls "Lateral speed-optimized illumination PSF." Any statement below about what that section literally discloses is therefore flagged as unverified. This matters because the whole § 103 question turns on the gap between "coarse scan proposed" (attributed to that reference) and "how to reconstruct" (the '657 patent's asserted contribution).

1. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A POSITA here would hold an M.S. or Ph.D. in physics/optics/engineering, or equivalent, with ~2–5 years' experience in laser-scanning microscopy (LSM), image-scanning microscopy (ISM), point-spread-function (PSF) engineering, and linear-systems/deconvolution image reconstruction. This skill level matters because the disputed step — unmixing superposed spatial-frequency bands by inverting a known mixing matrix — is squarely within the ordinary toolkit of a linear-systems-trained optics engineer (see §5).

2. Scope and content of the prior art

3. Element-by-element mapping of claim 1

Net: every claim-1 element except the specific (e2) PSF-regularizing unmixing step is disclosed or plainly suggested by the cited art. The novelty/nonobviousness battleground is therefore narrow: (i) does the art disclose/obviously suggest the unmixing step, and (ii) does it motivate applying it in the coarse-scan, line-spot regime?

4. Proposed § 103 combinations

Combination A (primary): DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 (+US 2015/0077842) ⊕ EP 2317362 A1 / Müller & Enderlein ⊕ US 2017/0227749 A1

• Reference 1 supplies (a), (c), and the acceleration motive — a line spot (non-diffraction-limited along the line) scanned coarsely for speed.
• References 2 supply (b), (d), (e), (e1) — static oversampling detector, per-pixel PSFs, reassignment, and the "solve the system of equations" reconstruction backbone.
• Reference 3 supplies (e2)/(e3) — the express teaching that the detector-channel data are mixed and that the object is recovered by a demixing matrix / frequency-filtering operator, with Wiener-type deconvolution.

Motivation to combine: All three are in the same field (high-resolution LSM), solve the same problem (resolution beyond the diffraction limit / faster acquisition of the same), and two of the three share the same assignee (Carl Zeiss Microscopy / MicroImaging). Same-assignee, same-problem references are the paradigm of a KSR "design incentive." Moreover, Reference 1 itself creates the unmet need: it proposes coarse scanning but, per the '657 patent's own admission, "makes no reference at all as to how this reconstruction is to be performed," and the obvious naive approach ("spatially assigning the signals of the detector array into the target image") is said to yield "disturbing artifacts." A POSITA confronted with that express gap would look to the ISM reconstruction literature (Ref. 2) and to the demixing/deconvolution machinery already used by the same applicant (Ref. 3).

Combination B (equivalent, arguably stronger on (e2)): DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 ⊕ US 2017/0227749 A1 (Zeiss demixing/deconvolution) ⊕ Müller & Enderlein

Here the unmixing element (e2) is directly supplied by the same-assignee demixing reference, and the reassignment element (e1) by Müller & Enderlein. The motivation is even more direct: "improving a similar device [coarse ISM] in the same way" (MPEP 2143(III)) by applying the applicant's own known demixing/deconvolution technique.

Combination C (corroborating secondary art)

EP 2317362 A1 ⊕ US 2011/0267688 (Kleppe) ⊕ the general multi-channel dealiasing/Ω(k)-inversion art, with the coarse-scan feature supplied by DE 10 2013 015 933. This variant emphasizes that the "unmixing" of superposed frequency bands is a known, nameable technique in undersampled imaging generally.

5. Why a POSITA would have been motivated (rationales)

1. Known problem, known solution (KSR; MPEP 2143). Coarse scanning means the sampling step in the first direction exceeds the pre-reconstruction Nyquist requirement. Undersampling aliases the spectrum — i.e., it superposes spatial-frequency components. This is textbook. When the aliasing/mixing matrix is known from the system PSFs (which ISM provides, since the per-pixel PSFs are determinable from excitation/detection PSFs — exactly what the '657 patent asserts about S_h), inverting the matrix recovers the object. The Ω(k)-inversion formalism (D̄=Ω·O) and the SIM band-unmixing literature show this was a standard tool.

2. Same-assignee, same-problem references (design incentive). Zeiss's own '933/'842 line-spot coarse-scan proposal and Zeiss's own '749 demixing/deconvolution proposal together supply every element; combining them is "the product not of innovation but of ordinary skill and common sense" (KSR).

3. Predictable result. Because the per-line PSFs repeat periodically (the "n line groups" the '657 patent describes), the resulting artifact is a known, deterministic periodic/Moiré pattern — not an unpredictable phenomenon. A solution that deconvolves with a known, spatially-varying PSF to yield a homogeneous effective PSF is the expected remedy (the '657 FIG. 3C outcome).

4. Obvious to try with a finite, small set of identified options. The '657 patent itself enumerates the candidate reconstruction approaches (spatial reassignment; phase-of-PSF reassignment; matrix unmixing; direct system solution). Where the prior art identifies a small number of solutions and the applicant merely picks the working one, that is the classic "obvious to try" posture under KSR.

5. No teaching away. DE 10 2013 015 933 asks for speed; ISM asks for the reconstruction; nothing in the cited art teaches that the demixing approach is unworkable or contraindicated for the coarse-scan case.

6. Dependent claims

No dependent claim appears to add a feature that is not either (a) expressly taught by one of the cited references or (b) an obvious design/optimization choice.

7. The strongest non-obviousness counterarguments (and why they are weak here)

1. The gap is real and admitted. The '657 Background states DE 10 2013 015 933 "makes no reference at all as to how this reconstruction is to be performed." If the only reference proposing coarse scanning is genuinely silent on the unmixing, an applicant can argue the specific (e2) step was not disclosed. Rebuttal: the gap is exactly what invites combination with the ISM and demixing references, and the result is predictable — the hallmark of KSR obviousness rather than patentable invention.

2. The ISM references teach fine (sub-spot) overscanning, not coarse scanning (EP 2317362's increment is "smaller than half the diameter of the illumination spot"). So they arguably "teach away" from undersampling. Rebuttal: EP 2317362 explicitly relies on an overdetermined system; recognizing that a known demixing matrix still admits a usable approximate solution when the scan is coarse is an ordinary linear-algebra insight, and DE 10 2013 015 933 affirmatively pushes toward coarse scanning — so the two references pull together, not apart.

3. Secondary considerations. None are established from the record here. Acceleration of ISM was a known, articulated goal (hence no evidence of a long-felt, unsolved need distinct from the prior art's own aim), and no unexpected-result or industry-praise evidence is in the fetched record. If the applicant can show that the specific unmixing (versus naive reassignment) produced an unexpected, dramatic artifact elimination, that would be the best secondary-consideration hook — but the '657 specification frames the artifact problem and its cure as predictable ("It practically corresponds to the original image … the Moiré effects are compensated"), which undercuts an unexpected-results argument.

8. Bottom line

• Claim 1 is vulnerable under § 103. The cited art supplies every element except the PSF-regularizing unmixing step; the nearest-miss element is squarely met or obviously suggested by (i) the same-assignee demixing/deconvolution reference US 2017/0227749 / DE 10 2014 111 167 and (ii) the well-known aliasing/Ω(k)-matrix-inversion technique in undersampled imaging, motivated by the same-assignee, same-problem DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 coarse-scan proposal and the EP 2317362 A1 / Müller & Enderlein ISM reconstruction.
• Claims 2–8 are each, on the present record, obvious over these combinations (see the mapping in §6).
• The single strongest patentability argument for the applicant is the express admission that the coarse-scan proposal did not disclose reconstruction, combined with any showing that the specific unmixing formulation was non-routine. On the cited art as it stands, that argument is more likely to be treated as "obvious to try" than as a § 103 rebuttal.

9. Explicit uncertainties / what would change this analysis

1. I did not read the full text of DE 10 2013 015 933 A1. Its "Lateral speed-optimized illumination PSF" section is decisive. If it expressly discloses line spacing equal to the spot extent and a demixing/solve approach, claim 1 falls under a single reference (§ 102 or § 103). If it discloses only coarse scanning with no reconstruction (as the '657 Background asserts), Combination A/B is the operative theory. Retrieve DE 10 2013 015 933 A1 / US 2015/0077842 A1 / US 9,864,182 B2 full text before relying on this.
2. I did not retrieve US 2014/0361154 A1 (Olympus) text — treated as flagged, not relied upon.
3. Identifier discipline (not auto-corrected): the '657 "Definitions" block renders one citation as "EP 23173862 A1," while the specification and cited-art table use "EP 2317362 A1." Both strings are reported verbatim; I treat the substantive reference as EP 2317362 A1 (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, 2011). Likewise, the same family number "102013015933" appears as "DE 10 2013 015 933 A1"/"DE102013015933" across sources, and its US counterpart appears as both US 2015/0077842 A1 and granted US 9,864,182 B2 — same document family, reported as found.
4. No litigation/PTAB activity bearing on this patent was found (per the prior section), so there is no estoppel or IPR record to factor in.
5. This is a technical § 103 assessment based on the patent's own characterization of the art plus the fetched reference records; a formal invalidity opinion would require the full specifications of each reference and claim-construction analysis of "first spatial direction," "reassignment," and "unmixing."