Courts have previously rejected patents on diagnostic methods that involve testing a patient and then running the results through an algorithm to come up with a diagnosis.

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Rebecca Landa, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, doesn't think the increase can be attributed to the study methods alone or to a purely diagnostic issue.

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He predicts the company should benefit as doctors start demanding new gene-based diagnostic tests for their patients, such as new methods for genotyping the AIDS virus.

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Recently, a group of doctors who study physicians diagnostic errors have come around to rejecting a recycling of the old systems methods and have said that methods of reducing hospital errors must be rethought and tried in experimental settings to prove their worth.

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