Week 0: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology
February 16, 2024
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.
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