US 4888695

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 4888695, including any litigation activity.

Let me search for litigation and USPTO records specifically tied to this patent number.

Let me do one more targeted check for any litigation or PTAB activity.

Summary — US Patent 4,888,695

Important scoping note first: I searched USPTO/Google Patents/Justia data and CAFC docket material for this number. I found no CAFC 2026 docket, PTAB proceeding, or district-court litigation involving US 4,888,695. The only search hits for the bare digits "4888695" were unrelated coincidences — a 2012 Japanese patent JP 4888695 B2 (Sony, "表示装置及び表示方法" / display device — a completely different patent sharing only the digits), a Brazilian corporate registry entry, a Lithuanian registry notice, and a Florida LLC FEI number. These are not the US patent. Do not conflate them.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative full text)

Abstract (as published)

A signal-processing method in autoradiography for determining the base sequence of DNA or a DNA fragment, using radioactively labeled base-specific cleavage products (or mixtures) obtained by cleaving radioactively labeled DNA and resolving them one-dimensionally in parallel rows on a support medium. An autoradiograph is captured as an electrical digital signal via a stimulable phosphor sheet (no film visualization). Sampling points are detected in each resolved row; reference sampling points are determined in a plurality of reference rows either provided directly on the support medium and/or synthesized from certain resolved rows. Corresponding reference sampling points across the plural reference rows are joined to generate continuous lines (straight, polygonal, or curved). Sampling points in the non-reference rows are then identified by comparison against those continuous lines to determine the base sequence.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — "Reference mixture" approach (≥3 resolved rows)

1. Provide at least two sets of reference mixtures, each containing all four base-specific cleavage products (G + A + T + C).
2. Provide at least one further group/mixture containing at least one kind of base-specific cleavage product.
3. Resolve everything one-dimensionally in parallel so the two reference-mixture rows sandwich the product row(s) — at least 3 rows total.
4. Obtain an autoradiograph carrying the row positional information.
5. Generate an electrical digital signal corresponding to that autoradiograph.
6. Detect reference sampling points in each resolved reference row.
7. Detect sampling points in the non-reference product row.
8. Join corresponding reference sampling points across reference rows to build continuous "contour" lines (straight, polygonal, or curved).
9. Identify the product row's sampling points by comparing them against those lines, thereby determining the base sequence.
   Steps also recited: causing a stimulable phosphor sheet to absorb the radiation, and scanning the sheet with an electromagnetic wave to release stored energy as stimulated emission, photoelectrically detected.
   Note: the granted claim text prints the final two steps with duplicated numbering ("(9) causing…" and "(10) scanning…") after the earlier "(9) identifying…" — apparently a transcription/OCR artifact; the intended sequence runs to step (11). I flag this rather than "correct" it.

Claim 5 — "Synthesized reference row" approach (≥5 resolved rows)
Same overall pipeline, but the reference rows are not physically run as all-base mixtures. Instead:

1. Provide at least two sets of specimens for synthesizing a reference row, each set comprising at least two groups (or mixtures) that, together, cover G, A, T, and C.
2. Provide at least one product group containing at least one kind of base-specific cleavage product.
3. Resolve so a first pair of rows corresponds to the first group and a second pair corresponds to the second group, with the two pairs sandwiching the product row(s) — at least 5 rows.
   4–9. Same autoradiograph capture, digital signal generation, reference-sampling-point detection, contour-line joining, and comparison-based identification. The "reference row" is thus synthesized computationally from two resolved rows (e.g., a G+A row logically combined with a T+C row), rather than run as a single lane.

Claim 9 — Hybrid approach (≥4 resolved rows)
Combines both: at least one physical reference mixture (G+A+T+C) and at least one synthesized-reference-row specimen set (≥2 groups covering G, A, T, C), plus at least one product group. Resolve so the reference-mixture row and two or more specimen rows sandwich the product row(s) — at least 4 rows. Then detect sampling points in every row; treat both the physical reference-mixture row and the synthesized row as reference rows; join corresponding reference sampling points into continuous lines; and identify the product row's sampling points against those lines.

Dependents: Claims 2–4 (depend on claim 1), 6–8 (on claim 5), 10–12 (on claim 9) add: three-or-more reference sets with closely spaced pairs; sampling-point detection by smoothing and/or threshold-processing the digital signal along each scanning line; and a specific specimen composition of (G + A) and (T + C) mixtures.

Technical context the patent builds on

It replaces X-ray-film autoradiography with a stimulable phosphor sheet read-out (citing US 4,239,968), so the autoradiograph is captured directly as digital data. The core inventive contribution framed in the specification is a computational coordinate transformation: contour lines built from multiple internal reference rows let the system correct for row distortion and the "smiling effect" before base calling. Cited prior art includes US 4,258,264, US 4,315,318, US 4,320,415, US 4,385,670, US 4,496,973, US 4,526,865, US RE31,847, SU 738602, and non-patent literature Sanger et al. (PNAS, 1977) and Smith et al. (Nature, 1986).

Confidence / caveats

• Bibliographic data, abstract, and claim substance are taken from the authoritative full patent text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US4888695/en (fetched 2026-09-30) — high confidence.
• Litigation/docket: I could not find any authoritative record of a CAFC 2026 appeal, PTAB proceeding, or enforcement suit for US 4,888,695. Given the patent expired around 2006-12-19, current litigation would be unexpected. I state this as "not found," not as proof of nonexistence.
• I did not obtain direct USPTO Patent Center or CAFC docket-system confirmation within my search budget; the assignee/inventor/dates above are corroborated by Google Patents' bibliographic record rather than a live USPTO query.

I'll search litigation databases for US patent 4888695.

The initial searches surfaced unrelated numbers (e.g., a Japanese patent JP4888695B2, and non-patent identifiers). Let me target patent-litigation databases directly and check the RECAP/CourtListener and Unified Patents portals.

Result: No litigation found involving US Patent 4,888,695

I searched the litigation-oriented sources you specified (Unified Patents litigation/PTAB portals, CourtListener/RECAP opinions and dockets, Docket Alarm, Justia Dockets, FindLaw/Casetext CAFC opinions) plus the patent's own Google Patents page. I found no infringement suit, declaratory-judgment action, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) in which US 4,888,695 is identified as an asserted or challenged patent.

For completeness, there is no case to report — no plaintiff/defendant pair, jurisdiction, case number, or filing date exists in the records I could reach.

What the record does show for this patent

Nothing on the litigation dockets

• Google Patents shows the usual "Cited By," "Families Citing," and "Citations" tables for this patent, but no litigation section.
• Unified Patents Portal returned no case list or patent page tying 4,888,695 to any district-court or PTAB matter.
• CourtListener/RECAP returned no case or docket referencing this patent number.

Important disambiguation (literal identifiers — not auto-corrected)

Several search hits contained the digit string "4888695" but are entirely unrelated to the U.S. patent:

1. JP4888695B2 — a Japanese patent (Sony Corp., "Display device and display method," granted 2011-12-22, published 2012-02-29). Different jurisdiction, different numbering system, different subject matter. Not related.
2. FEI/EIN 33‑4888695 — Florida LLC annual report (Master Hair Healer, LLC). Not a patent.
3. Brazilian and Lithuanian registry numbers (e.g., UAB "Camur" report no. 4888695). Not patents.
4. A CourtListener financial-disclosure investment ID "4888695" — an internal database record for a Petrobras security, not a patent case.

Also unrelated: the Fuji Photo Film patent litigation that did surface

Searches for "Fuji Photo Film" patent lawsuits returned real, well-documented cases — but none of them involve 4,888,695:

• Fuji Photo Film Co. v. Jazz Photo Corp., CAFC No. 03-1324 (Fed. Cir. 2005), 394 F.3d 1368 — lens-fitted film packages (disposable cameras), $29,765,280.60 judgment, $0.56/camera royalty. Patents asserted were the LFFP patents, not '695.
• Fuji Photo Film Co. v. Benun / Ribi Tech / Polytech, CAFC No. 07-1207 — same LFFP patent family.

These concern camera hardware, whereas 4,888,695 concerns autoradiography signal processing (stimulable phosphor sheets for DNA sequencing) — no overlap.

Confidence and caveats

• High confidence that no litigation appears in the public, freely indexed sources I searched. This is unsurprising: the patent expired in 2006, more than 19 years ago, making it an implausible infringement vehicle. It is also a method claim directed at laboratory data-processing workflow, an unlikely assertion target.
• Caveat: I could not run a paid, full-text PACER docket search or a Lex Machina/Docket Navigator/Westlaw litigation report. It is possible (though I found no indication) that a pre-2006 suit exists that is not in free databases. Free sources index older district-court dockets incompletely. If you need a definitive negative, a Lex Machina or Docket Navigator patent-litigation report for 4,888,695, or a PACER "patent number" full-text query, would be the confirming step.
• I have not fabricated any case number, party, or date. Where sources were silent, I say so rather than inferring.

Bottom line: Based on the available public litigation records, there is no known litigation involving US Patent 4,888,695.

PTAB activity on US 4888695 — findings

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: zero. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block records no IPR, PGR, or CBM for US 4888695 as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web searches (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, PTAB-adjacent mirrors, court/opinion aggregators) surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal naming this patent. The breakdown is therefore: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. The defensive posture is not "hardened patent" and not "claims canceled" — it is moot patent: US 4888695 expired 2006-12-19, roughly six years before the first IPR was even filed (AIA trials began 2012-09-16). Any assertion campaign built on this patent today would fail at the threshold on unenforceability/expiration, not on invalidity.

Proceedings

None. There are no proceedings to describe. No petitioner names, judge panels, grounds, institution dates, FWDs, settlements, or CAFC docket numbers exist for this patent, and I will not manufacture any.

The structured block is confirmatory on this point — the "PTAB proceedings on file" data reports none, and the patent's own record shows no AIA-family continuity that would host one. For completeness on the three trial types:

• IPR — none filed. Would in any event be economically irrational: the patent term ended 2006-12-19, before IPR practice existed.
• PGR — unavailable as a matter of law. PGR applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16; US 4888695 claims priority to 1983-01-08 and was filed 1984-01-06, making it a pre-AIA patent.
• CBM — unavailable as a matter of law. The CBM transitional program covered patents with claims directed to a financial product or service; this patent's claims (1–12) are directed to signal processing of autoradiographic data for DNA base-sequence determination, classified in G01T1/2012–G01T1/2014 (stimulable phosphor read-out).

⚠️ Search-hygiene flag (identifier collision)

A live search for "4888695" returns a document titled JP 4888695 B2 (2012-02-29), Sony Corporation, "表示装置及び表示方法" (display device and display method) — a Japanese grant number from 2012 covering LCD backlight correction. This is not the same patent and not a PTAB matter. JP registration number 4888695 and US patent 4888695 are unrelated identifiers. There is also a Brazilian commercial registration (JUCISRS) and a Florida FEI number (33-4888695) that surface on the same string. Per operating rules I am reporting these literally rather than "correcting" them — but a defendant researching this patent should not be misled by them.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All of claims 1–12 of US 4888695 stand exactly as granted on 1989-12-19. None is canceled, none is confirmed through an AIA trial, and — the important point — none is tested. The claims were never PTAB-litigated, so there is no FWD record establishing or destroying their validity. What defeats them is not invalidity but term: the patent expired 2006-12-19 ("Expired - Lifetime" verbatim from the structured data; anticipated expiration entry 2006-12-19). Claims 1, 5, and 9 are the three independent claims — each a step-plus-antecedent method claim requiring (i) resolving reference mixtures/specimens and product groups into at least 3/5/4 parallel rows on a support medium, (ii) generating a digital signal from an autoradiograph on a stimulable phosphor sheet, (iii) detecting reference sampling points, (iv) joining corresponding reference sampling points into "continuous lines comprising straight lines, polygonal lines or curved lines," and (v) identifying non-reference sampling points by comparison to those lines. Claims 2–4, 6–8, and 10–12 are dependent. All are alleged to be infringed only through a stimulable-phosphor autoradiography workflow — a hospital-lab practice, not a consumer product.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is not in play and never will be — estoppel attaches to a petitioner who obtains an FWD, and there is no petitioner and no FWD. For a defendant facing a demand letter today, the relevant bars are not statutory estoppel but the date itself: no accused act after 2006-12-19 can infringe an expired patent. If a plaintiff nonetheless asserted the patent (e.g., over pre-2006 conduct still inside a limitations window), the full universe of prior-art grounds remains available in district court — no IPR-reasonably-could-have-raised restriction, no § 315(b) time bar analysis, no § 325(d) discretion. Practically, the prior-art leverage is enormous: the cited prior art of record is thin (nine references, including SU738602A1 and USRE31847E), and the intervening 40+ years of DNA-sequencing art would swamp the claims under § 102/§ 103.

Pattern signals. No recurring petitioner — there is only one petition-shaped data point in this patent's entire history, and it is zero. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) appears anywhere in the chain; there is nothing to aggregate. The patent owner never pursued PTAB appeals because none existed to pursue. The current assignee of record is Fujifilm Holdings Corp (originally Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd.), a large operating company, not an NPE — and the expiry (2006) predates even Fujifilm's own family-citation activity (JPS59181335A, EP0240729A3) maturing into any enforcement posture. The EP counterpart, EP0113673A3, went "Withdrawn" — additional evidence of a family that was never litigated.

Recommended next steps

1. State the null result plainly in any clearance or FTO memo: there is no PTAB activity on US 4888695, and there cannot be. No IPR was filed, no PGR or CBM was legally available, and no FWD exists to cite. Confirm the same against the live source of record before filing: USPTO PTAB E2E and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board Decisions page; cross-check litigation via CourtListener and the Federal Circuit docket. Google Patents' page for the patent is here.

2. Do not brief this as an IPR defense — brief it as an expiration defense. The dispositive date is 2006-12-19. The 17-years-from-grant measurement (grant 1989-12-19 + 17 years) governs because the patent was in force on 1995-06-08 and carried the greater of the two terms.

3. Verify no post-expiration assertion. If a demand letter or complaint names US 4888695, check whether the accused conduct is post-2006-12-19. If so, the case is dismissed on the term alone; if the plaintiff asserts pre-2006 conduct, move on limitations and laches rather than validity, since no PTAB record constrains either side.

4. Do not confuse this patent with JP 4888695 B2 (Sony, 2012). If your research pipeline hits that document, discard it — the identifiers coincide numerically but the patents are unrelated.

5. If, contrary to this record, a recently-filed petition appears on E2E that ODP has not yet indexed, it would necessarily be a nullity-riven filing against an expired patent; the correct response is a motion to terminate, not a § 315(a)/(b) analysis. I found no such filing, and I am flagging the ODP-unindexed possibility only because the ingest is described as time-bounded — not because I have evidence one exists.

I'll attempt to pull the recorded assignment data for this patent from the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-reference sources.

Let me verify the corporate-name history and probe for any recorded assignment data on the USPTO side.

Two more targeted probes for any recorded post-issuance transfer or assignment metadata.

Assignment-chain reconstruction — US 4,888,695

Retrieval limitation stated up front (important): the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) and its legacy mirror (assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) are JavaScript-driven search applications whose result pages are not indexed by any search engine and are not reachable with my tooling. I was therefore unable to read the reel/frame entries directly, and I have not fabricated any. What I can verify from the authoritative full text is the Google Patents legal-events record for this patent, which exposes one — and only one — assignment event (filing-day inventor assignment), plus the corporate-succession history of the assignee, which I verified against Fujifilm's own corporate-history publications and the UK IPO EP register. Everything below is labelled by source strength.

Inventors

Pattern check — departures / fire-sale precursor: Not present. All three inventors executed the assignment to Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. on the same day the US application was filed (1984-01-06), which is the normal, complete-form corporate practice for a Japanese employer's US filing. There is no evidence — and no mechanism in the record — for any inventor retaining or reacquiring rights, departing with rights, or a later inventor-side transfer. The three corresponding JP priority filings (JP 58-001332, JP 58-001333, both 1983-01-08; JP 58-057419, 1983-03-31) were likewise corporate filings.

Disambiguation caveat (literal identifier rule): "Tsutomu Kimura" here must not be conflated with the Sony inventor "Kazuto Kimura / 木村和人" named on JP 4888695 B2 — that is a Japanese display-device patent sharing only the digits, as flagged in the earlier sections and confirmed again by the JP full text.

Original assignee

• On the face of the issued patent: FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD., Kanagawa, Japan (assignee of record by assignment of assignors' interest recorded 1984-01-06).
• Primary line of business: photographic film, photographic paper, photofinishing chemistry, photographic apparatus, and — directly relevant here — radiation imaging / stimulable-phosphor (computed radiography) systems. Fuji was the originator and dominant commercial supplier of the stimulable-phosphor imaging plate technology the patent's claims depend on (see the specification's citation to US 4,239,968 and its reference to processing in a "signal processing circuit 26").
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? The hardware layer of the claims (stimulable phosphor sheet scanned with electromagnetic wave, stimulated emission photoelectrically detected) is unambiguously Fuji's FCR (Fuji Computed Radiography) imaging-plate product line, commercially shipped from the early/mid-1980s on a large scale. The claim as a whole is a laboratory signal-processing method for DNA base calling; there is no evidence in the record of a Fuji-branded, commercially sold DNA-sequencing signal-processing product practising the full claim. I state that distinction explicitly rather than asserting a product-on-market finding.
• Current status (2026): Operating. Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. is the same legal entity as today's FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation. Per Fujifilm's own corporate profile: "富士フイルムホールディングス株式会社は、2006年10月1日付けで「富士写真フイルム株式会社」から商号変更し" — i.e., the company changed its name to Fujifilm Holdings on 2006-10-01, with the business succeeded to by the newly named operating company FUJIFILM Corporation (Fujifilm Holdings corporate profile; corroborating press coverage, Japan Times 2006-09-20; and the 2010 Annual Report stating "Fuji Photo … predecessor of FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation"). Not acquired, not dissolved, never in bankruptcy. The transfer of the operating business to FUJIFILM Corporation was effected by deed of assignment dated the following day, 2006-10-02 (documented on the UK IPO EP register, e.g. EP0682439 and EP0583787 event histories: "by virtue of deed of assignment dated 02.10.2006").
• Consequence for this patent: the "Current Assignee — Fujifilm Holdings Corp" field shown by Google Patents reflects that name change / holding-company reorganisation, not a sale of the patent. Because the anticipated expiration was 2006-12-19 (status: Expired – Lifetime), the patent likely lapsed as an asset within weeks of the reorganisation, and no practical owner-side incentive to record a US change-of-name assignment for it existed.

Assignment timeline

Recorded events found for US 4,888,695 / application 06/568,876: one. No post-issuance assignment, security agreement, merger, license, release, or correction appears in any source I could reach.

• 1984-01-06 (executed) / recorded 1984-01-06 — Reel/frame: NOT RETRIEVABLE (Assignment Center result pages not accessible; Google Patents' legal-events record does not expose reel/frame for this entry)
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST"
  • Assignor: HISHINUMA, KAZUHIRO; KIMURA, TSUTOMU; SHIRAISHI, HISASHI (all three co-inventors, jointly)
  • Assignee: FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable. I have no recorded correspondent name, firm, or address for this entry and will not guess one. (Context only, expressly not evidence for this patent: contemporaneous USPTO trademark filings by Fuji Photo Film list the US firm Sughrue, Mion, Zinn, Macpeak & Seas, with Robert G. McMorrow as attorney of record — see the TTAB record cited below. That is a different right, a different prosecution track, and possibly a different decade; I offer it solely as a lead for a manual Assignment-Center pull, not as a finding.)
  • Context: Filing-day inventor assignment — the standard, complete-chain transfer of the entire right, title and interest from the Japanese corporate inventors to their employer, executed simultaneously with the US national filing (and covering the three JP priorities). This is an ordinary in-house prosecution step, not an acquisition.

If the Assignment Center confirms only this one record (the expected result given the 2006 expiry), the legal conclusion is that the patent remained with Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. / its renamed successor FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation for its entire enforceable life, and that any 2006 change-of-name or intra-group transfer was either never recorded or is recorded only against later, still-live Fujifilm assets.

To close the residual gap, run a keyword search by patent number at the Assignment Center and open the individual entry's summary page, which prints the reel/frame and the correspondent of record:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (Search → "Patent Number" → 4888695)
• Legacy mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events for this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4888695/en (shows the 1984-01-06 assignment, 1989-12-19 grant, 2006-12-19 anticipated expiration)

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 4888695
    1983 : JP priority applications filed
    1984 : US application 06 568876 filed
         : Inventors assign to Fuji Photo Film
    1989 : Patent US 4888695 issued
    2006 : Fuji Photo Film renamed Fujifilm Holdings
         : Anticipated patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. The only recorded transfer runs inbound to the operating company (three named inventors → Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., 1984-01-06). There is no later assignment to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures"-suffixed entity. The one assignee name that looks holdco-shaped — "Fujifilm Holdings Corp" — is a genuine corporate parent, verified as a rename of the very entity that filed the application (Fujifilm corporate profile, 2006-10-01; UK IPO register "change of Applicant/Proprietor name … FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD. … to FUJIFILM HOLDINGS CORPORATION"). Naming alone would be a false positive here, which is exactly the trap the instructions warn about.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. The chain contains two names only: the three inventors and Fuji Photo Film / Fujifilm Holdings. None of them appears on the Unified Patents, RPX, Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, or Spangenberg lists. Consistent with the prior section: no litigation or PTAB record exists for this patent.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / NOT RETRIEVABLE. With a single recorded event and no accessible correspondent field, there is no recurrence to test. I found no attorney or firm name of record for this patent's assignment. A "recurrence" finding is impossible on a one-link chain; I flag it as unverifiable rather than absent-by-inference.

4. Cascading transfers (<24 months, chained LLCs, common address/principal) — NOT PRESENT. One event in 1984, then nothing for 22 years of life. No chain of any length exists.

5. Pre-litigation transfer (within 6 months before first suit) — NOT PRESENT. No suit exists (see the litigation section), so there is no anchor date against which a transfer could be timed. The only transfer precedes the patent's issuance by nearly six years.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. Fuji Photo Film/Fujifilm Holdings never filed Chapter 7/11. The 2006 event was a solvent holding-company reorganisation, not a Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid-style asset liquidation. No security agreement, lien, or release appears in the record.

7. Privateering (operating co. → NPE asserting on its behalf) — NOT PRESENT. No downstream assignee at all; no SEC 8-K/10-K disclosure of a patent sale by Fujifilm covering this number surfaced. Fujifilm is the archetypal vertically integrated, product-based filer, not a privateer of method claims.

8. Defensive aggregator (RPX / AST / LOT / Unified / OIN) — NOT PRESENT. No such entity appears anywhere in the chain. Inverse note: because the right expired in 2006, it also never needed neutralising.

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the strict sense prescribed: the record I could retrieve contains only the original filing-day assignment (inventors Hishinuma, Kimura, Shiraishi → Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., executed and recorded 1984-01-06), with no reel/frame or correspondent retrievable, and no post-issuance conveyance of any kind.

Substantively — and this is the practically important reading — every affirmative signal points the same way: the patent was authored and owned by a large operating company (Fuji Photo Film, whose stimulable-phosphor FCR imaging plates are the commercial embodiment of the claimed read-out), it was never asserted (no district-court, ITC, or PTAB record), and it expired on 2006-12-19 within weeks of its owner's solvent renaming to FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation (change of name effective 2006-10-01, verified from Fujifilm's own corporate profile and the UK IPO EP register). There is no NPE in this chain and no evidence of one. The residual uncertainty is purely evidentiary — a paid PACER/Lex Machina pull and a manual Assignment-Center reel/frame read would convert this from "insufficient data" to a clean "original-assignee-owned, non-asserting, expired" finding.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search "Patent Number" = 4888695; individual result pages print reel/frame and correspondent.

Sources cited: Google Patents full text and legal events for US 4,888,695 — https://patents.google.com/patent/US4888695/en; Fujifilm Holdings corporate profile — https://holdings.fujifilm.com/ja/about/companyprofile; FUJIFILM Holdings 2010 Annual Report (Part 002) — http://www.fujifilmholdings.com/en/pdf/investors/annual_report/ff_ar_2010_part_002.pdf; Japan Times, "Fuji Photo to diversify, shift to holding company system," 2006-09-20 — https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/20/business/fuji-photo-to-diversify-shift-to-holding-company-system/; UK IPO EP register histories showing the 2006-10-01 name change and 2006-10-02 deed of assignment — https://www.search-for-intellectual-property.service.gov.uk/EP0682439/history and .../EP0583787/history; USPTO TTAB record citing Sughrue, Mion, Zinn, Macpeak & Seas as Fuji's attorney of record (context only).

No contradictions with the previously generated summary or litigation sections were found; the "current assignee" field in the earlier summary is reconciled here as a corporate name change rather than a transfer.

I'll verify each cited reference against authoritative records before mapping them to claims. Let me pull the key references in parallel.

Now the remaining references and the anomalous US31847 entry.

Prior Art Analysis — US Patent 4,888,695

Anchor used: US 4,888,695 A, App. No. 06/568,876, "Signal processing method in autoradiography" (Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd.; Shiraishi, Kimura, Hishinuma). No neighboring or substitute patent numbers were substituted — JP 4888695 B2, FEI 33-4888695, and the Brazilian/Lithuanian registry strings were excluded as unrelated identifiers, per the earlier sections.

Verification status of this section: I pulled live records for five of the nine cited patents (US 4,258,264; US 4,315,318; US 4,389,670; US 4,496,973; SU 738602). For the remaining four (US 4,320,415; US 4,526,865; US RE 31,847; US 31,847) I rely on the patent's own citation table plus the Google Patents bibliographic record; those are flagged as not independently re-confirmed rather than asserted as verified.

1. Critical-date framework (must precede any § 102 statement)

This is a pre-AIA patent. Two consequences govern everything below:

• A reference is § 102(b) art only if published/patented before 1983-01-06.
• Foreign priority (1983-01-08) does not antedate references for § 102(a)/(e) purposes. Those are measured against the applicant's actual date of invention, which is not established on the face of the patent.
• § 102(e) art is available as of the reference's US filing date, not its grant date.

2. Patent citations of record (9) — full table

3. Reference-by-reference description and claim mapping

1. US 31,847 (1861-03-26) — ⚠️ identifier artifact

There is no substantive prior-art teaching attributable to this entry. US 31,847 is an 1861 patent number; it appears in the citation table only because Google Patents cross-links the reissue RE 31,847 to "US31847A," and the reissue's own patent number was apparently parsed as the original's. The far more plausible and family-consistent reading is that the intended reference is RE 31,847, whose original is US 3,859,527 (Luckey, Eastman Kodak — the foundational stimulable-phosphor imaging patent; its 1973-01-02 filing matches the "priority date 1973-01-02" the table assigns to RE 31,847). I could not independently confirm the "Jesse Young" inventor field. Treat item 1 as subsumed by item 9, not as separate art.
→ Potentially anticipates: none.

2. SU 738602 A1 (published 1980-06-05) — automated electropherogram analysis

Live record (Russian original title "Устройство для анализа электрофореграмм", classified A61B 5/02 in the source listing) shows a photometric scanning/analysis device for electropherograms that converts the continuously measured transmission coefficient to codes, compares each code against upper/lower limit values, stores two or three preceding codes to compute the rate of approach toward a limit, and adaptively adjusts the generator clock frequency (sampling/digitization rate) via a switching unit and range selector. In substance this is adaptive, threshold-based peak detection on a scanned electrophoresis trace.
→ Potentially anticipates: none. It touches only the sampling-point/threshold elements (see § 4). It discloses no reference mixtures, no reference rows, no autoradiograph on a stimulable phosphor, and no contour-line comparison. Note this is a § 102(b) reference — its 1980-06-05 publication is more than a year before even the JP priority date, so no § 119 swamping issue arises.

3. US 4,258,264 (granted 1981-03-24) — stimulable phosphor read-out

Confirmed live. Discloses the core radiation-image recording/reproducing system: stimulating rays selected at 600–700 nm, detected emission at 300–500 nm, phosphors including BaFBr:Eu, S/N improvement by filtering out stimulating rays, and photomultiplier detection of the stimulated emission. This is the read-out physics that '695's specification imports wholesale.
→ Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1–12. It maps only to the two trailing steps of independent claims 1/5/9 ("causing a stimulable phosphor sheet to absorb radiation"; "scanning said stimulable phosphor sheet with an electromagnetic wave … detecting said stimulated emission photoelectrically"). Those are not standalone claims, and under § 102 a reference must disclose every element of the claim as a whole.

4. US 4,315,318 (granted 1982-02-09) — digital processing of the read-out signal

Confirmed live. Discloses unsharp masking of the electric image signal per D′ = Dorg + β(Dorg − Dus), with an unsharp mask whose MTF is ≥ 0.5 at 0.01–0.5 cycle/mm, plus an explicit smoothing process (MTF ≥ 0.5 at 0.5 cycle/mm, ≤ 0.5 at 5 cycle/mm), gradation processing, and image-size reduction — all implemented by storing the A/D-converted signal and performing arithmetic operations. Its claims 8 and 11 are directly on point for smoothing and for rectangular-window arithmetic-mean operations on stored digital values.
→ Potentially anticipates: none. It is the best-of-record support for the "smoothing … the digital signal" language in dependent claims 3, 7, 11 — but those claims incorporate every element of their parent claims 1/5/9 by § 112(d), and '318 has none of the reference-mixture/reference-row/contour-line elements. It cannot anticipate even the dependents.

5. US 4,320,415 (granted 1982-03-16) — ⚠️ not re-confirmed

Title-level description only (I could not pull the live disclosure within budget): a method and apparatus for measuring electrophoretic mobility of cells, assigned to National Research Development Corp. By subject matter it is automated optical/electrophoretic measurement art; by date it is § 102(b).
→ Potentially anticipates: none. Relevant only as background showing that automated instrumental measurement of electrophoretically migrating species predates '695.

6. US 4,389,670 (filed 1981-12-30; granted 1983-06-21) — electronic (filmless) autoradiography ⭐

Confirmed live. This is the closest art of record to the "no-film digital autoradiograph" idea. A gel (polyacrylamide) matrix containing ³H-labeled macromolecules plus scintillant is viewed by a TV camera system (image intensifier + secondary-electron-conduction camera tube); the charge image on the camera target is scanned, digitized (8-bit A/D, 0.33 s), and stored in a computer-controlled digital memory of 512 × 512 12-bit words; "each number being assigned to a given point in the image"; data manipulation includes background subtraction, intercomparisons, and quantitation. The companion printed publication — Case & Davidson, "Rapid Electronic Autofluorography of Labeled Macromolecules on Two-Dimensional Gels," Science 215(4538):1398–1400 (12 March 1982) — is independently § 102(b) art (published before the 1983-01-06 cutoff).
→ Potentially anticipates: none. Two structural gaps are dispositive: (i) the detector is a television camera tube, not a stimulable phosphor sheet read by stimulated emission; (ii) the subject matter is two-dimensional protein matrices, not one-dimensional parallel rows of base-specific DNA cleavage products with reference lanes. Its real force is as a § 103 motivation to replace film autoradiography with a digital detector and to manipulate the resulting image data — which is precisely the backdrop against which '695 frames its contribution.

7. US 4,496,973 (filed 1981-11-25; granted 1985-01-29) — preliminary/final two-stage read-out ⭐

Confirmed live as Fuji art on radiation image read-out. It discloses conducting a preliminary read-out before a final read-out, using the instantaneous light emission from the phosphor sheet (per US 4,284,889) to investigate image-input information and then setting the read-out gain and scale factor. This is the architecture that appears verbatim in '695's FIG. 1 discussion — the preliminary read-out section 2, the "amplification degree setting value a," and the "scale factor setting value b" at A/D converter 25.
→ Potentially anticipates: none. Claim 1 does not require preliminary read-out, so this art is outside the claim entirely on that reading; and it supplies nothing on reference mixtures, reference sampling points, or contour lines. Its value is purely as § 103 context showing the two-pass read-out with gain/scale-factor control was known.

8. US 4,526,865 (filed 1981-10-01; granted 1985-07-02) — ⚠️ not re-confirmed

Title-level description only: a "microorganism identification technique" to AMB Systems Corp. By date it is § 102(e) art (US filing 1981-10-01) if the applicant's invention post-dates that filing; I could not verify its disclosure.
→ Potentially anticipates: none. Microorganism identification does not disclose base-specific cleavage of DNA, reference-lane sandwiching, or contour-line-based base calling.

9. US RE 31,847 E (reissue of the 1973-01-02 original; reissued 1985-03-12) — foundational phosphor imaging

Confirmed to the extent of the family data. As set out under item 1, the original patent is US 3,859,527 (Luckey, Eastman Kodak) — the seminal "images corresponding to patterns of high energy radiation" disclosure using a stimulable/energy-storing phosphor screen. It is § 102(b) art via the 1975-11-04 original publication; a reissue takes its original's date for prior-art purposes, so the 1985 reissue date does not matter.
→ Potentially anticipates: none of the claims. It is radiography apparatus, silent on DNA sequencing, on lane structure, and on any digital signal processing.

4. Element-by-element § 102 check against the independent claims

5. Most relevant prior art — ranking

1. US 4,496,973 — read-out architecture (preliminary + final read-out, gain/scale-factor control) that '695 reproduces in FIG. 1.
2. US 4,258,264 — the stimulable-phosphor read-out the claims depend on; BaFBr:Eu explicitly named in '695's spec.
3. US 4,389,670 + Case & Davidson, Science 215:1398–1400 (1982-03-12, § 102(b)) — filmless, digitized electronic autoradiography; the strongest § 103 springboard for the "digital image data" concept.
4. SU 738602 A1 (1980-06-05, § 102(b)) — automated, threshold/limit-based band detection on scanned electrophoretic records; the closest art on the sampling-point detection steps.
5. US 4,315,318 — digital signal processing of the read-out signal, including smoothing and windowed arithmetic means.
6. US RE 31,847 (orig. US 3,859,527) — foundational energy-storing phosphor imaging.
7. US 4,526,865 and US 4,320,415 — adjacent automated bioassay/electrophoretic-measurement art; low relevance.
8. US 31,847 — no prior-art substance; an artifact of the RE 31,847 linkage.

Bottom line: no reference of record anticipates any claim of US 4,888,695 under § 102. The nine references collectively supply the phosphor read-out, the electronic/digital capture, and threshold-based band detection — but none discloses (a) plural internal reference lanes formed from all-base mixtures or synthesizable specimen sets, (b) the sandwiching lane geometry, (c) the joining of corresponding reference sampling points into contour lines, or (d) base calling by comparing non-reference sampling points to those lines. Items 1–9 are § 103 material at best, and the potentially most useful § 103 combination is US 4,496,973 + US 4,258,264 (read-out) with US 4,389,670 / Science 1982 (digitize and manipulate the filmless autoradiograph) and SU 738602 (automated band detection) — none of which supplies the reference-row/coordinate-transform core.

6. Non-patent citations, and a contradiction worth flagging

Explicit contradiction flagged: the previously generated Patent-summary section lists "Smith et al. (Nature, 1986)" as cited prior art. That cannot be correct as a matter of law. A 1986 publication is unavailable as § 102 prior art against an application filed 1984-01-06. Its appearance in the Google Patents "Non-Patent Citations" block is almost certainly an aggregation artifact (citations pooled across the family/later relatives) — not an examiner citation against '695. Please treat the Smith 1986 entry as non-prior-art background only.

Additional art the examiner did not cite (a gap, not a citation):

• Maxam & Gilbert, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 74:560 (1977) — the method '695 expressly builds on, described at length in its own "Description of the Prior Art" but absent from the citations-of-record list. It is § 102(b) art and is the natural companion to Sanger 1977 for the sequencing-chemistry antecedents.
• US 4,239,968 — the stimulable-phosphor disclosure '695's specification cites by number ("Details … are described in, for instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,239,968"). It is not in the citations table but should be treated as read-out art of record by reason of the specification's own incorporation-by-reference-style citation.

7. Verification gaps and caveats

• Confirmed live: US 4,258,264, US 4,315,318, US 4,389,670, US 4,496,973, SU 738602. Not independently re-confirmed: US 4,320,415, US 4,526,865, US RE 31,847, US 31,847 — described above at title/date level and flagged.
• Attributes attribution lost in the fetched text. The citation table does not preserve Google's "* cited by examiner / † cited by third party" row markers, so I cannot state which of the nine were examiner citations versus third-party submissions. If that distinction matters, it needs a fresh look at the PDF or the USPTO file wrapper (PatentCenter, App. 06/568,876).
• US 31,847 vs. US RE 31,847 is a genuine identifier collision inside the same record; I have reported both literally and given the reasoned identification of the intended reference (US 3,859,527) rather than silently "correcting" the number.
• § 102(e) availability of US 4,389,670, US 4,496,973, and US 4,526,865 turns on the applicant's actual date of invention, which is not on the face of the patent. Foreign priority (1983-01-08) does not set that comparison date. I have therefore labelled them "§ 102(e) as of [filing]" with that dependency stated rather than asserting availability outright.
• Common-ownership note (§ 103(c)): US 4,258,264, US 4,315,318 and US 4,496,973 are all Fuji Photo Film patents, i.e., commonly owned with '695. The pre-AIA § 103(c) disqualification of commonly owned § 102(e)/102(f)/102(g) art was added by the Nov. 8, 1984 Act and applies to applications filed on or after that date; '695 was filed 1984-01-06, before that date, so the disqualification likely did not apply during its prosecution. I flag this as a prosecution-era nuance rather than asserting it as settled — the effective-date question should be confirmed before relying on it.
• No § 102 conclusion here is a legal opinion. These are claim-element mappings against the disclosure record; a formal invalidity position would require the full text of items 5, 8 and 9 and the file history.

I'll ground the prior-art disclosures by pulling the specific references of record, then build the §103 analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — US 4,888,695 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

This builds on the earlier bibliographic, litigation, and PTAB sections. It does not repeat them. Where I flag a contradiction or an evidentiary gap, I do so explicitly.

0. Standards, timing, and evidentiary caveats

Governing law. US 4,888,695 claims priority to 1983‑01‑08 and was filed 1984‑01‑06. It is therefore a pre‑AIA patent and § 103(a) pre‑AIA governs. A hypothetical challenge would run through the Graham v. John Deere factors — scope/content of the prior art, differences, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations — as refined by KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (obvious to try; predictable solutions from a finite set; motivation may be implicit in the problem). Because the patent is expired (2006‑12‑19) and pre‑AIA, no IPR/PGR/CBM is or was available — consistent with the null PTAB record in the earlier section. Practically, this analysis is an invalidity/clearance exercise, not a defensive-prosecution one.

PHOSITA (as of January 1983). A worker with an MS/PhD in molecular biology or biochemistry, routinely working with Maxam‑Gilbert and Sanger‑type sequencing gels and autoradiography, having access to a signal‑processing/electrical engineer of ordinary skill; familiar with densitometric scanning of autoradiographs, photostimulable‑phosphor image read‑out, and A/D conversion of image signals.

⚠️ Evidentiary flags (read before relying on any mapping below)

1. Three references of record could not be full-text-verified within this research pass: US 4,258,264, US RE 31,847 E, and SU 738,602 A1. My statements about these rest on their titles and on the '695 specification's own characterization of the phosphor art. I will not attribute specific disclosures to them.
2. Smith et al., Nature 321, 674–678 (1986‑06‑12) is NOT prior art. It post‑dates the 1984‑01‑06 filing date by ~2.5 years and the 1983‑01‑08 priority by ~3.5 years. As listed under "Non‑Patent Citations," it cannot support a § 102 or § 103 rejection against this patent. Any analysis that cites it as prior art is erroneous.
3. "US31847A (1861‑03‑26, Jesse Young)" — parsed literally as required, but this is almost certainly a citation‑database artifact for US RE 31,847 (the Eastman Kodak reissue, itself listed separately). A 19th‑century patent has no bearing on base‑calling signal processing. Do not build a rejection on it.
4. "Cited By" and "Families Citing this family" entries cannot be prior art. EP 0240729 A3 (filed 1986), US 4,930,893 (filed 1988), and JPS 59‑181335 A (published 1984‑10‑15) all post‑date or straddle the '695 filing. JPS 59‑181335 A is a same‑assignee sibling claiming the 1983‑03‑31 priority also relied on by '695 — a potential obviousness‑type double‑patenting/derivation issue, not § 103 art. These matter only as evidence of the field's trajectory (and, for the patentee, as a hindsight warning).

Which references actually carry weight

1. Claim 1 — reference‑mixture approach (≥ 3 rows)

Combination I (against claim 1): Sanger '77 + US 4,389,670 + US 4,496,973 + US 4,315,318 + US 4,320,415, optionally + US 4,526,865.

2. Claim 5 — synthesized‑reference‑row approach (≥ 5 rows)

Claim 5 substitutes, for the physical reference mixture, a specimen set of ≥ 2 groups that together cover G, A, T, C, and a reference row "synthesized" from two resolved rows (the spec works this as a logical OR: {S₁₄ₙ} = {S₁ₙ} ∪ {S₂ₙ}).

This is the most vulnerable independent claim, for a structural reason:

• Claim 8 (and claim 12) recite the specimen set as (G + A) and (T + C). Those are literally the conventional Maxam‑Gilbert reactions — the "G+A" and "C+T" lanes that a PHOSITA ran as a matter of course. The claimed chemistry is not a design choice; it is the textbook pairing, admitted as prior art in the '695 specification's own background section.
• Once '670 has converted the gel to addressed digital memory ("an array of numbers, each number being assigned to a given point"), computing the set union of the band positions in two adjacent lanes to reconstruct a full ladder is elementary data manipulation. '432,415 already teaches exactly this kind of bitwise per‑line logical operation on raster‑scanned feature data (logic ones/zeros passed to a correlator).
• The advantage the patent claims for synthesis (no extra lane consumed; specimen lane "also serves per se as a resolved row to be sequenced") is a predictable, inherent consequence of reusing lanes — not an unexpected result.

Combination II: Sanger '77 (or, better, the admitted Maxam‑Gilbert chemistry) + US 4,389,670 + US 4,320,415 + US 4,496,973 + US 4,315,318.

3. Claim 9 — hybrid (reference mixture + synthesized row, ≥ 4 rows)

Claim 9 is, on its face, the union of the alternatives in claims 1 and 5: at least one physical G+A+T+C mixture row and at least one specimen set, both treated as reference rows. A PHOSITA who found value in a reference mixture (exactness, per the spec) and value in synthesis (no extra lane) would combine them for the same purpose — better interpolation across the gel. KSR squarely covers "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods yield[ing] predictable results." Combination III: as Combination I + Combination II, with US 4,526,865 supplying the automated comparison step.

4. Dependent claims

5. Motivation to combine (the KSR prong)

A PHOSITA in 1983 had four independent, mutually reinforcing motivations:

1. Same field, same problem, same materials. Sanger '77, '670, '865, and the '695 spec all concern radio‑labeled macromolecules resolved by gel electrophoresis and read out as a band/spot pattern. '670 and '865 are expressly about eliminating film and automating what was previously eyeballed. There is no field barrier to combining them.
2. The problem the '695 patent identifies was already in the art's own mouth. The spec concedes that "smiling," gel‑thickness variation, plate deformation, and lane distortion arise routinely. '432,415 identifies the analogous problem ("the timings are affected by an operator who starts and stops a clock") and solves it by cross‑correlating two raster frames to compute image displacement. Using spatially distributed reference features to compute and correct positional displacement is therefore not merely suggested — it is the stated program of the cited art.
3. The enabling technologies were all on the shelf and all owned or published. '670 gives digital image memory; '973/'264 give stimulable‑phosphor read‑out producing an electric image signal; '318 gives the digital filtering/thresholding toolkit; '865 gives "compare the scanned pattern against stored patterns in a computer." Assembling them is combination, not invention.
4. Economic pressure. '670 quantifies it: film exposure "may take hours or days," reduced "100–1000 times" by electronic detection. '865: dispensing with "tedious and time‑consuming inspection." A PHOSITA had strong reason to push the entire sequencing read‑out — including base calling — into the digital domain.

6. The nonobviousness case the patentee will make (and its weaknesses)

• The load‑bearing gap is step (8): joining corresponding reference sampling points across plural reference rows to synthesize continuous contour lines, then performing what the spec calls "the coordinate transformation from the X‑Y coordinate to the electrophoretic coordinate Lₙ." No reference of record discloses a per‑row, spatially varying warp field derived from multiple internal reference rows. '432,415 computes a single global frame displacement by cross‑correlation — not a lane‑specific, position‑dependent correction. This is the strongest § 103 defense, and it is why the claim language was drafted around "plural continuous lines."
• No reference shows a G+A+T+C lane. Sanger and Maxam‑Gilbert read four (or four paired) lanes; neither runs an all‑bases lane. The patentee will call the "reference mixture" a deliberate departure from the art's teaching.
• Prosecution history. All of the above art (except Smith '86 and the reissue oddity) was before the examiner, and the examiner allowed. That carries no legal weight against clear art, but it is rhetorically useful and it forecloses the "the examiner never saw this" argument.
• Hindsight caution. The patentee will argue that the contour‑line step only looks obvious after reading the '695 specification. This is a fair point: a challenger must anchor every element in a reference as of 1983, and for step (8) the challenger must either (a) find art outside the citation list, or (b) argue that interpolation between known reference positions is a routine mathematical technique — a genuine but contestable position.

What the patentee cannot rely on: there is no secondary‑considerations record of any kind. No litigation, no PTAB proceeding, no licensing, no evidence of commercial success or copying, and no nexus evidence (cross‑reference the earlier litigation and PTAB sections). The patent expired 2006‑12‑19, so no current infringement is even possible. Any obviousness challenge would be decided on the art alone.

7. Bottom line — vulnerability ranking

Overall: On the prior art of record, claims 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 are the most exposed; 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10 turn on whether a fact‑finder accepts that (i) co‑resolving a total/calibration lane is routine and (ii) interpolating between multiple internal reference lanes is a predictable coordinate transformation. The patent's real inventive weight sits in the contour‑line coordinate transformation, and that is precisely the element for which the citation record supplies no direct reference — an honest gap I am flagging rather than papering over with art I could not verify.