Memorial Sloan Kettering sues GE HealthCare alleging 'willful' patent infringement
GE HealthCare is facing a lawsuit alleging the imaging manufacturer has deployed and profited from technology that an individual from a different organization developed.
New York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on June 1 filed a lawsuit against GEHC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The lawsuit accuses GEHC of patent infringement, suggesting the company’s “MotionFree” technology was actually developed by someone at MSK.
The technology is built into many of GEHC’s PET/CT systems. It helps compensate for motion on imaging due to patient breathing. The correction method, known as respiratory gating, actively monitors and adjusts parameters using real-time data to produce diagnostic quality images without making patients hold their breath, which many often struggle with.
But MSK contends that the person responsible for this technology is Adam Kesner, PhD, a physicist at the cancer center. As evidence, MSK cited previous patents (issued between 2017 and 2024) for the technology that list Kesner as the sole inventor.
“Dr. Kesner devised a novel approach for generating motion-corrected images that utilizes fluctuations in image data over time to derive motion signals,” court documents charge. “Dr. Kesner’s use of image data to characterize patient motion over time enabled the generation of motion-corrected images that improve lesion detectability and diagnostic accuracy, and thus the effectiveness of patient treatment strategies, without external hardware and in a fully automated manner—a significant advance over prior art methods.”
Memorial Sloan Kettering said it made GE HealthCare aware of one of the patents since at least Nov. 6, 2019, when the two corresponded about it; the two also had an exchange in 2023 regarding additional patents related to the technology. As such, MSK alleges that GE HealthCare's disregard for the patent as “willful and deliberate.”
“Defendants knew or should have known that making, importing, using, offering for sale, and/or selling the accused products constituted an unjustifiably high risk of infringement of the Asserted Patents.”
MSK is seeking damages (with pre- and post-judgement interest) for infringement, treble damages for willful infringement, and attorney fees.
More detailed information about the case can be found here.
In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.