Prior art seems to exist

Question

In reference to the patent: US 2010/0080432 A1

A paper has been published that would constitute prior art for this patent: "PIB-PET SEGMENTATION FOR AUTOMATIC SUVR NORMALISATION WITHOUT MR INFORMATION" (by Raniga, Bourgeat, Ourselin, Villemagne, O'Keefe, Rowe), presented at the ISBI conference in April 2007. The submission for this conference was 1 Dec 2006, and thus preceded the priority date for this patent application.

Would this publication invalidate the patent?

full paper here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4193294

Answer 1

If you look at the priority date of the patent it is 30 January 2007. The conference paper was made available to the public in April 2007. By definition of prior art in the patent law, a document can only be considered prior art with regard to a given patent if the document was made available to the general public before the priority date. In the case you cite, even tough the submission date is prior to the priority date of the patent, the fact that it's content was not made available to the general public until April 2007 implies that this publication cannot be considered as a prior art and therefore does not invalidate the patent.