Searching for relevant patents using TRIZ and Patent Citation Analysis – a Case Study Shashi Bhushan Mehta*, Navneet Bhushan^, Priyaranjan Mishra* Emails {shashi.mehta@philips.com , navneet.bhushan@crafitti.com , mishra.priyaranjan@philips.com } *Philips Innovation Center, Bangalore ^Crafitti Consulting Private Limited, Bangalore Abstract: Reviewing prior work and review papers helps to build guidelines to new conceptions in technical and non-technical innovations. The review work is commonly persuaded before patent drafting/filing or new novel research area or new business. Presently the review work is conducted based on journal publications, published patent documents, open web sites, etc. This review work typically depicts past innovations in technology or business. On the other hand Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) approach can help to map inventions in the past, present and future time frame. Further it can help to expand inventions at component level, sub-system level or system level. This helps to identify new opportunities, for science, technology, or business. In this paper we are analyzing prior publications in perfusion imaging by applying systematic approaches such as Patent Citation Analysis and TRIZ, to study the growth trends and explore new improvements. Blood perfusion assessment through Magnetic Resonance Imaging is widely used for diagnosis for different anatomy particularly brain. This paper proposes to replenish the review work done in the past and present. Further the paper shows how TRIZ can be used to explore possible futures in the area of perfusion imaging through Magnetic resonance. Introduction Number of new inventions in all fields is growing rapidly. Increasing globalization and exchange of ideas across fields, geographies and countries has led to more and more inventors seeking patent protection for their inventions. In this rapid explosion of patents, it is but natural that patents are granted to inventions that may be very strong or relatively ineffective. The range of strength of inventions for which patents are granted is also increasing due to multiple factors. This leads to a problem of finding strong and relevant patents, not only from the point of reviewing the prior art in terms of patentability of new inventions, but also to define the new arenas for research. In this paper we propose an integrated approach combining social citation patent analysis and TRIZ levels of inventions to find relevant and stronger patents with relatively less effort in the dense forest of patents which is becoming denser every day. The methodology is used to find and analyze patents in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging – especially perfusion imaging. In Section 2 we give a brief overview of perfusion imaging. In Section 3 process of finding interesting patents in what is described as the social citation network of a patent is described. Section 4 describes mapping of interesting patents based on 5 invention levels of TRIZ. The paper concludes with Section 5 giving pointers for further application of the methodology. Copyright ©2010 by the original authors