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.