Shiven Sharma

and 11 more

Objectives: This study aims to review and analyze the most cited patents in the field of rhinology, identifying technological trends and patterns of development. Study Design: Cross-sectional analysis. Setting: National database. Methods Patents were gathered from the Lens database by identifying titles, abstracts, and claims that contain the term “rhinology” and were classified under the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) code A61. After manual curation corrected for duplicate and extraneous patents, the remaining patents were ranked by the number of forward citations. The top 100 patents were put into five subcategories: “Balloon and Catheter-Based Treatment,” “Drug Delivery Systems and Therapeutics,” “Non-Surgical Diagnostic Devices,” “Sinonasal Ablation Techniques,” and “Surgical Instruments and Methods.” Results With the initial search criteria, 1,440 patents were identified, and 521 patents were retained after the manual screening process. Analysis of the top 100 patents revealed that most patents had priority years between 2000-2010. Sixty-four percent of these patents were active at the time of the study. Non-Surgical Diagnostic Devices was the largest subcategory, followed by Balloon and Catheter-Based Treatment, and then Sinonasal Ablation Techniques. Balloon and Catheter-Based Treatments and Sinonasal Ablation Techniques comprised the majority of the first quintile of patents by citation number. Linear regression showed a weak correlation between priority year and patent rank by citation (Pearson’s R = 0.34, R-squared = 0.12). Conclusion This analysis highlights the ongoing evolution in rhinologic technology, particularly in Non-Surgical Diagnostic Devices. Additionally, it serves as a resource for informing future research and development efforts within this field.