VENTANA FILES PATENT SUIT AGAINST VISION SYSTEMS UNIT

Ventana Medical Systems announced Sept. 19 it had initiated patent litigation against Australian firm Vision Systems' BioSystems unit.

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts Sept. 18, Ventana alleges that Vision Systems' Bond X and maX OCR instruments infringe on its patent for technology allowing laboratory instruments to schedule multiple tests, a process called "schedule optimization."

OCR, or optical character recognition, is computer software designed to translate either images of handwritten or typewritten text into machine-editable text or pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme representing them.

Ventana obtained a summary judgment of infringement of its dual bar code patent against the earlier generation of Bond instruments, the firm said. Ventana's lawsuit alleging patent infringement by the current Bond instruments is pending after an appeal recently heard by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Ventana said.