AN APPLE a day, it is said, helps keep the doctor away. For two desperately ill babies however, taking Viagra – the male impotence drug – has actually saved their lives.

Lewis Goodfellow, born 16 weeks early, is making excellent progress after being given the drug, also called Sildenafil, to help open blood vessels in his under-developed lungs.

Erin Cottington, on the other hand, is doing well after taking one of the blue pills every day to help keep her blood pressure down.

Lewis, one of the first babies to be given the drug at the Royal Victoria Infirmary’s special baby care unit in Newcastle, was born premature, with seriously under-developed lungs.

When he was three weeks old, he needed open-heart surgery to correct a faulty valve. But doctors became increasingly worried about his lungs. Despite being given maximum supplies of oxygen, he still struggled to get it into his blood, reported the Daily Mail.

As a last resort the doctors tried Viagra through a drip – and he started to improve.

Now after five months in hospital, Lewis is back at home with his parents. And he is even starting to smile.

Erin Cottington was first given Viagra when she was a few days old to help her overcome life-threatening circulatory problems caused by her under-developed heart and lungs.

Erin was born with her intestines and bowels pushed into her chest cavity, crushing her heart and right lung.

Artificial blood was pumped into her lungs to help increase their capacity. She was given Viagra to open up her blood vessels and improve the flow.

Altogether, Erin had had eight operations, including open-heart surgery, before she was three months old.

After more than 10 months in hospital, Erin returned home to Blackley, Manchester, where she is developing like a normal child.

Source : Thestar

Frost & Sullivan, a global leader in growth consulting, presents this award every year to the company that most distinguishes itself by developing breakthrough products with highly sophisticated features and capabilities. The award further recognizes the recipient's successful creation and integration of revolutionary new technology into its existing suite of products.

The natural-language analysing software FreePharma® is capable of analysing the pharmacological information in natural language and transforming it into structured text. The technology accepts information from a range of sources, including voice recognition, e-mail, a keyboard, referral letters, electronic or document-based information. It actually analyses the pharmacological input and then structures the prescriptions into the required format, either in real time or at a later stage in time. T

Introduction to Natural Language Processing and Understanding: Enter Clinical Data the way you want, Capture Clinical Data the way you need. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) are emerging technologies for extracting data from free text documents. CARINg member Karen Doyle with Dr. James Flanagan and David Hellman from Language and Computing provided a session to explain some of the basics of these technologies. They also demonstrated use cases for using

Language and Computing (L&C) NV announces that its FreePharma® advanced medication extraction tool has been selected for use by Marshfield Clinic, Marshfield, Wisconsin. FreePharma® will be used in an extensive data-mining project to support Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation (MCRF), a division of Marshfield Clinic. MCRF is the largest private not-for-profit medical research foundation in Wisconsin and one of the largest in the nation. L&C’s FreePharma was selected based on a thorough su