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NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Coimbra, Portugal, 03/10/2010 - Critical Health S.A. is proud to announce that it has won an award in the European IT Excellence Awards, an event which gathered in London the leading organizations in this area.
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Critical Health won in the category for Information Management, with one of its Retmarker product (retmarker.com). The European Excellence Awards are organized by IT Europa, aimed at recognizing the crucial part that ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and Solution Providers play in the resolution of their clients’ real problems. Entities from 26 countries competed for this prize.
RetmarkerAMD is an innovative solution that Critical Health has been developing with several experts from AIBILI (Association for Innovation and Biomedical Research on Light and Image), an R&D institute located in Coimbra. This solution allows for the digital marking of images from patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), the main reason of blindness in persons over 50 years old in developed countries. RetmarkerAMD simplifies the diagnostic by ophthalmologists, as they now have a more precise source of information, which is not prone to errors related to the complexity in the estimations of lesion areas present in each region of the retinography (digital photography of the retina).
“This new tool allows for a faster and more precise way to conduct a detailed analysis of the lesions associated the early and late forms of Age-related Maculopathy. It promotes the creation of a broad basis for the assertive discussion on the prognostic value of the different lesions found in this disease”, underlines Professor Rufino Silva, a respected expert from AIBILI and the Coordinator of Section for the Retina and Vitreous of the Portuguese Ophthalmology Society, who has been contributing towards the development of this solution together with Professor José Rui Faria de Abreu and Maria da Luz Cachulo M.D.
RetmarkerAMD is a new product in the Retmarker family which also includes RetmarkerC and RetmarkerDR. RetmarkerC enables the automatic detection of changes in the retina resulting from several pathologies. As for RetmarkerDR, it is a software solution that monitors the progression of Diabetic Retinopathy. This latter version helps ophthalmologists detect and calculate the formation and disappearance rates of microaneurysms in the retina. This information, according to the most recent clinical research, predicts a risk factor of progression of a disease that is one of the highest growing causes of preventable blindness in developed countries.
According to the World Health Organization, Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) it is the primary cause of visual impairment in industrialized countries, affecting people over 50 years old. As for Diabetic Retinopathy, it is a retinal pathology related to diabetes and is the main cause of blindness in the working age population.
Critical Health’s solutions will enter the European market in the first semester of 2010.
About Critical Health
Critical Health (critical-health.com) is a Critical Software spin-off dedicated to the development of groundbreaking technological solutions to prevent loss of mobility and vision. The first solution developed by Critical Health is Retmarker, a decision support software available in different versions. RetmarkerC enables the detection of changes in the retina due to several pathologies. RetmarkerDR allows for the monitoring of the progression of Diabetic Retinopathy. RetmarkerAMD allows for the annotation and automatically quantifies the lesions associated with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Critical Health’s innovative solutions are developed through partnerships with the best universities, hospitals and scientific research institutions.
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