The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Advisor: Dr. Rachna Sharma
Internship Location: LianYing, China and Fremont
Onsite Mentor: Yangzho Harry DU
Neuroimaging technologies allow researchers to analyze the brains of alive specimen, often humans. With many advancements in the development and use of said technologies, the potential uses of these are growing rapidly. However, this growth is limited by the difficulty researchers face in accessing information and collaborating technologies and innovations, as a vast amount of information available is stored away in extremely scattered patents. With my project, I intend to take this information and organize it, making it more accessible to researchers hoping to innovate in said field. I will look through a wide collection of databases filled with patents and gather information and numbers on trends and developments using online resources. I will also gather firsthand data with the in-house patent team of LianYing, a Chinese neuroimaging company. This will not only let me see firsthand if foreign depictions of China’s research are well-founded, but also gain direct experience with the technologies I’m studying. Once I have all my data, I will put it all onto a spreadsheet and look for patterns and trends. I will use the information gathered to make different types of Patent Landscape Reports, some showing trends of growth and change in specific areas of technology, others to show which researchers or groups are the top innovators in which fields, and mapping the areas researched, using keywords, phrases, fields, and specific researchers.
Project Blog
Week 0: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
There was a simple doctrine I used to believe in as a kid: if the brain were simple enough for humans to understand, humans wouldn't have enough brainpower to understand it. In theory, this concept made sense. The more complex the things we're able to understand, the more complex should be the very mechanism that allows us to understand these things in the first place. As a result, the smarter we'd be, the smarter we'd have to be to understand why we were so smart. However, the perceived impossibility of this task, to little me, was taken not as an impasse, but as a challenge. Like Sisyphus, further determined to roll the boulder to the top of a mountain by the very fact that it would be impossible, young Yifei became determined to unravel the secrets of the brain and find out what made it roll.
As I continued to study the brain throughout the years, I learned both how true and how false that statement was; the brain was far more complex than I'd realized, but human research had delved deeper into understanding its layers than I could have ever imagined. Captivated as I am on the idea of understanding what lets us understand, I hope to do whatever I can to help further neuroscience, the study of the brain.
Welcome to my senior project, a landscape study on patents relating to neuroimaging technology. Those are a lot of big words, so let me explain them one by one, what they mean, and why they mean so much to me.
A Landscape Study is a way to analyze a large amount of information from a large amount of patent data and sort it all into one comprehensible document. This document is called a Patent Landscape Report (PLR). A PLR does not go in detail on the information contained within the patents, but rather finds trends and data across patents, such as new developments, trending topics, important researchers, and acts as a guide for researchers to know where to look.
But why is this meaningful? Well, the information in patents is very difficult to access. There are tens of millions of patents across the internet, and this information is scattered. Researchers who want to find information from patents must look through tons of separate databases, each filled to the brim with their own patents. There is a lot of information to be found here, too. An estimated 80% of the information stored in these patents is found nowhere else but the patents in which they were published. As a result, a ton of the information available on the internet is extremely difficult to access, dispersed across scattered databases.
The goal of a landscape study is to summarize the trends in this data so new researchers know where to find information on specific topics. My job here is to look through hundreds or thousands of patents, and gather data on what information to find where. This way, a new researcher looking into a specific topic within neuroimaging technology will have a simple, accessible way to find trends within today’s scattered patent landscape.
So what is neuroimaging technology, and why neuroimaging technology? Neuroimaging technology is a term to refer to techniques that are used to look at the brains of live subjects. It is a way to directly study the live brain in a non-invasive manner. There are many different ways neuroimaging technology works, from tracking the flow of blood to measuring the electric signals produced by the brain to producing an image using powerful magnets. All this is done in the interest of learning more about the brain.
The reason why I want to do this project is so I can coordinate the research being done in the present on neuroimaging technology. Both the US and China are doing lots of research in this field, though the research is split because of international differences. I, as a US citizen closely tied to Chinese culture, hope to try to bridge this gap, and help coordinate the research between the two countries by creating a Patent Landscape Report of the neuroimaging research between them. I will be utilizing both online and in-person resources, sometimes travelling internationally to look at the research directly. Hopefully, by the end of this project, I will have created a valuable resource for the neuroimaging and research community.
Week 1: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Bonjour again. Week 1 of my project is almost over, and I’ve gotten a couple of things done since we’ve begun so let’s run through them really quick.
The first thing I did this week was speak with my external advisor about the general format and plan for this project. As the intended format of my project is a Patent Landscape Report, my advisor helped me find a few plans for how to format one and how research is generally gathered for such a report. For this day, I received some papers and guides to read on how to format such a project, as well as a video of a lecture from his time spent preparing for his bar exam to watch on the topic.
Starting from the next day, I began work on the project itself. I decided on two documents to read for this week, as they were quite lengthy, and I’d spent the first half of the week formatting rather than researching. The first of the papers I will be reading is a literature review of the field of neuroimaging technology used as research for ADHD. A literature review is a document that collects key sources of a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with another. Seeing as my own project also intends to collect many sources of a topic and discuss them, finding a literature review such as this one and analyzing it in detail would be a huge benefit. Furthermore, the potential for neuroimaging technology as research for ADHD was one of my main inspirations for this project, and as such, I felt this document was a good place to start. Overall, the first document puts the project to a strong start!
The second source I’m reading from for this week is also related to neuroimaging and ADHD, but rather than being a document of its own, it is an excerpt from a medical journal. This comes with many of the benefits I mentioned about my first source regarding neuroimaging and ADHD, but it comes with its own differences from the first. Though I haven’t finished reading and analyzing this source yet, this one so far is documenting new potential areas of research in this field.
Week 2: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
sup nerds
Today is approaching the end of the second week of my senior project, and my departure for China to begin the second half of my work. Because I’m leaving soon to work on the main chunk of this project, I decided to go for a less research-orieinted plan for this week, and instead focused on learning many of the basic skills I will be using next week.
The most important skill for a research project such as this is, obviously, the ability to do research. This may seem simple enough; after all, we have the entire internet at our disposal. Any researcher can find anything they want just by doing a quick google search. What I spent the first half of the week learning is how to use google better. Things like how you can put words in quotations to make them exact phrases required, or behind a hyphen to exclude them from the search.
In addition, I listened to a lecture from a patent bar exam course on doing research for patents. This lecture was given by a patent bar examiner for law school students studying for the exam. This lecture gave an overview on general topics such as what patent prosecution is, how to obtain a patent, how patents interact with patent offices and the patent landscape, and more. Furthermore, the lecture broke down a lot of the jargon used in patent law, an important step as patent law is infamous for having many special definitions for phrases.
With what I learned from my studying and the lecture, I used the second half of the week to do research on my own to find patents and such. Since I have little experience looking through specialized databases or anything of the sort, I simply used Google Patents. During the second half, I found two interesting patents that I read through. The first of which was a paper on the use of Electroencephalogram (EEG) in diagnosing ADHD. The second of which was a collection of data from a study on ADHD brains using various techniques. Most of the two papers were just lists of discoveries rather than anything building up to a big point.
Anyway, that’s it for this week. I’ll see you next week for yet another update. Peace.
Week 3: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Good morning. Maybe it isn’t morning for you right now, but it is for me, because I have relocated to China for the second half of my project. Maybe you’re reading this blog in the evening.
This has been a pretty eventful week so far, but it’s simple enough to follow. The first half of the research was mostly setup, as I had to travel to China, meet with my advisor, and discuss plans for the upcoming weeks. For the current part of this project, we are planning to use Google Patents to do a surface level review of the landscape until I can access more sophisticated tools like IncoPat. Google Patents comes with various limitations such as not being able to trace assignees between international patent offices, so for now we will use Google Patents to gather more general data on the leading researchers and assignees on various topics and keywords.
Even if I’m referring to it as “surface level,” however, the research done with Google Patents is not going to be quick or easy. I will be sifting through hundreds of thousands of patents by various measures using advanced search settings. This week, I’ve begun gathering data on various keywords sorted by measures such as priority date, which is the earliest filing date in a family of patent applications, the assignee, which is the person or group whom a patent is filed for, the patent office, the governmental group which oversees patents, and whether the patent is a grant, a secured patent, or an application, a patent not finished being reviewed.
Well, those were a lot of big words, so to summarize, I’m in China doing research on patents, gathering data based on various categorizations that apply to the patents. I will be doing this through Google Patents until I am able to access more sophisticated patent search tools, which I will attempt to acquire next week. Until then, that’s it for now.
Week 4: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Buenos Dias. The fourth week of my senior project has come and gone, with not many big developments, but a lot of progress.
My week began with a pretty interesting day. On Monday, I took a tour of a company called “Boya Advanced Materials.” Boya provides specially engineered materials that are used in advanced applications, such as scintillation crystal materials, laser products, and high-end optical components. The focus of my visit was to study used in building a PET, such as LYSO, or lutetium-based scintillation crystal. Scintillator crystals are an important material used as a medium to convert ionizing radiation energy into light, which can be used to be detected by the PET or CT. Because Boya manufractures materials such as these, I was able to study firsthand how these products were made, as well as what is particular about them.
As for the rest of the week, I spent my time collecting more statistics. I used Google Patents’s “Download Search Results” function to collect large volumes of results at a time rather than sorting through them one by one, and am ordering them by various statistics such as date or relevance by putting them all into an excel sheet and sorting them using excel’s settings. I intend to do this with various different keywords and search options, such as last week’s mentioned patent family, application status, and assignee. Despite how simple the process is, it takes a lot of time, given all the possible keywords, settings, search options, and ways to organize data, so this job has made up the bulk of my time spent working this week, and will likely continue to do so for the weeks to come.
Week 5: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Hello again.
So marks the halfway point of this project, in terms of time, at least. Definitely not halfway through in terms of content. Regardless, I’ve made some pretty good progress this week. Progress I’m excited to share.
In contrast to some other weeks, this week’s work and research has been almost entirely online. This week, I spent the first half of the week collecting links and information online. Using Google Patents, you can download search results, along with assignee, inventor, grant status, priority date, filing/creation date, publication date, grant date (if applicable), and the title directly into a spreadsheet. Using this functionality, I formatted every single grant status patent pertaining to the keywords “Neuroimaging,” and “ADHD” since 2020 into a single spreadsheet, along with all the details mentioned above.
During the second half of the week, however, I began having internet issues. However, this was no problem, as the work from this half of the week was done offline. I began looking through the data in the document I’d created, trying to find recurring names, dates, and keywords. Using this, I can begin working on the project part of my project. By looking through this data, I can gather statistics on which of these is worth focusing on in the present; which topics, assignees, and inventors are currently creating the most activity in the field of neuroimaging.
Well, this was a bit of a shorter entry. There is not too much to describe, as most of my work this week has consisted of repeating the same task over and over. Even so, I got a good amount of work done, and things will be picking up a bit now that I’ve begun work on the actual report.
Week 6: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
After a week off from staring at names on an excel sheet, I’ve finally returned to continue my job of starting at names on an excel sheet, this time with new strategies in mind. Because the data I collected was on the patent landscape in china, the majority of results I found had their titles and descriptions in chinese, which, unfortunately, I cannot read. Probably should have thought of this problem arising when I decided to do a project on patent law in China. Regardless, I have to work around this problem and find a solution.
The main complication this gives rise to is that it makes things very difficult for me to find keywords in the articles. I’m going to need those keywords in order to get numbers on them for the project, so I had to do something. I decided that google translating each article title in the spreadsheet would be easier than learning how to read chinese in the next five weeks, so I began working at it.
Perhaps I should have realized a little sooner that I have a daunting task to accomplish. I had to think through a lot of possibilities before I finally saw some light. After two perfectly good days spent copy pasting patent titles in and out of google translate, I finally thought of a better idea. I realized that if data on keywords was what I needed, I could simply look for chinese keywords, and get the numbers on keywords in chinese. With this new idea, I messaged my external advisor, and asked him for suggestions on keywords, as well as their definitions. With this roadblock out of the way, I was finally able to contine staring at names on an excel sheet. I hope to make good progress now.
Week 7: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Hello everyone. I’m back this week to report on my seventh week of working on this report, which builds upon the new strategies I thought of in my sixth week.
Last week, I came up with the idea of searching and categorizing important trends in data through gathering numbers on keywords in chinese. This week, I began by using the same strategy to look for important researchers and developers in the field. This step is important as it gives future researchers and investors an idea as to which specific areas to look for activity. Currently, my data is split into two categories: United States patents, and Chinese patents, so I had to use the same method of simply searching for titles even if I didn’t understand them for the Chinese patents.
However, this proved to be much more difficult than finding the keywords. In contrast to the mere handful of topics I needed to search for, I had over 700 different names of people who had filed patents related to the topic I’m researching. Going through this list, and finding the number of patents filed by each would take way too long, so I decided to use Excel’s tools to take care of this.
Again, my blogs are getting shorter, as most of my work is becoming fairly repetitive, but regardless, work is getting done, even if it’s mostly the same.
Week 8: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Welcome back to my senior project. This week, we have finished up week 8, and oh boy is there a lot to unpack.
After all this time gathering data, it is finally time to work on putting this data into my Patent Landscape Report, the paper that is in the title of my project. As I said in my first blog, the goal of this paper is to take all the data I have gathered, and give new researchers in this field to have an easy place to know what are the trends in the data, and where to look if they wanted to do research. Now, after 7 weeks of work finding and gathering data, I can finally begin putting this together.
The first step I’m taking is to make graphs out of the data collected. This is what I spent my week on. A website called “ncopat has many tools that can help me do this job, especially with patents that come from China. However, access to Incopat is extremely restricted, and I need a code and a special type of account that I don’t have. The process of getting one of these accounts is extremely complicated, too. Fortunately for me, though, my external advisor’s law firm has access to incopat. However, unfortunately, I can’t use their account while the law firm is using it. Fortunately again though, being back in the US means my timezone is different from theirs, meaning that, as long as I do my research in the middle of the day, everyone at the law firm would (hopefully) be asleep, meaning that I’m free to do my work. This does lock me into a certain time window to do my research, but luckily, that’s when usually do my work anyway. With this set up, I was able to spend the week making the graphs.
Week 9: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Welcome back to my blog everyone. Today marks the end of the second-to-last week of this senior project. As time draws closer and closer to the finish, I have to pick up the pace at which I work to make sure I finish my report before time is up.
This week began with me continuing the process of making graphs of various bits of data I found. The first thing I graphed was the amount of applied patents against the amount of published patents each year. This would show the amount of activity and the growth of the field through time. One interesting thing I noted, though, was that all the patent landscape reports I was using as models or examples to base mine off of decided to use a bar graph for this chart. I found this strange, as I originally thought a line graph would work best for this, as I thought the goal was to show growth or change over time, so I decided to simply make one of both and ask my external advisor about it later.
The next thing I decided to look at was the lead publishers in neuroimaging research between the US and China. To do this, I made a graph the top 10 in both the US and China, as well as how many patents each had. The purpose of this was so that investors hoping to make a difference relating to research in this field would know the best places to look. On top of the graph I made, I also included research on the backgrounds of each company, as well as their products and the fields each company focused on, using tools from IPC.
So concludes my work on week 9 of this project. With only one week left, I have to work hard to make sure I can get everything I want in before the deadline.
Week 10: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
Bonjour. At last we’ve reached the final week of my senior project: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology. It’s been a long trip, but it’s almost over.
The first thing I did this week was create a graph of the different types of applicants that filed patents in China. Because I’m showing the composition of how much multiple parts make up of a whole, I decided to use a pie chart for this. This graph showed who filed these patents, like enterprises, universities, individuals, governments, etc. Following the trend of making pie charts, I made another showing the composition of different types of patents.
While researching during this final chapter of the project, I noticed something interesting. Most of the patents filed in China weren’t from Chinese applicants. I looked further into this using the tools Incopat provided me and it turned out, only around 25% of Chinese patents were filed by Chinese applicants. What’s even more interesting: the US filed an entire 33% of the patents related to neuroimaging in China. Further research showed that China only filed 1% of the neuroimaging related patents in the US, in contrast to the US’s whopping 70%. After realizing this, I decided to add new graphs to my project regarding each country’s cross-border applications. I added graphs of the patent trends and leading applicants for both the Chinese patents in the US, and the American patents in China.
And so concludes my 10th week of work on my senior project. These 10 weeks of work have provided me with a very dense and information packed result, and I intend to spend the next few days I have left polishing it into an SP-worthy product.