Gigabit wireless package handles strain of medical imaging, tough environment

In Sioux Falls, S.D., your options for giving remote users access to 500MB files are limited. And they’re expensive.

The files are X-ray, MRI and CT images taken usually at Sioux Falls’ Avera Cancer Institute, part of Avera McKennan Hospital. But they’re studied by referring doctors at other locations in and around the city. File movement and access was made possible by an aging wireless100Mbps Ethernet connection that was bogging down on ever larger files and increasing unreliable.

The solution, after considering the limitations of carrier options, was to upgrade the existing link to one gigabit, using full-duplex, point to point radios from BridgeWave Communications.

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In Sioux Falls, S.D., your options for giving remote users access to 500MB files are limited. And they’re expensive.

The files are X-ray, MRI and CT images taken usually at Sioux Falls’ Avera Cancer Institute, part of Avera McKennan Hospital. But they’re studied by referring doctors at other locations in and around the city. File movement and access was made possible by an aging wireless100Mbps Ethernet connection that was bogging down on ever larger files and increasing unreliable.

The solution, after considering the limitations of carrier options, was to upgrade the existing link to one gigabit, using full-duplex, point to point radios from BridgeWave Communications.

The imaging service is part of a battery of technical, diagnostic and treatment services from Medical X-Ray Center, a private, for-profit radiology group serving South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa. As imaging gear has improved, the files have gotten a lot bigger, straining the wireless bridge that linked the center’s headquarters in Sioux Falls with McKennan Hospital, two miles away, where most of the imaging is actually done. Files can reach 500MB, though 100MB is the average size, says Rod Sevening, IS manager for Medical X-Ray.

The Center also hosts a server and database with treatment plans for radiation patients, and that data is downloaded over the link to be reviewed by doctors, therapists, and technicians programming the radiation equipment.

Typically, remote physicians, therapists and others connect from their outlying facilities over LANs and then T-1 connections to the center’s headquarters. The 5.8 GHz wireless bridge then carried them to data and images stored at McKennan Hospital. For its picture archiving system, the center uses the open source Conquest software, which supports a medical imaging standard called Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard. The IS department concluded that any replacement connection had to have at least 700Mbps bandwidth, and it had to meet federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements to protect patient information.

Carrier options, from Qwest, SBN and Midcontinent Communications and several others, were limited, or pricey, or both. At the time, only SBN seemed to be able to deliver gigabit capacity. “If you’re leasing from a telco company and paying for gigabit bandwidth over fiber, that’s over $10,000 a month,” Sevening says. Another option was leasing multiple lower-speed lines, and load balancing the traffic between them. “But that would have been a very expensive alterative,” Sevening says.

There was another wireless option: satellite radio. “But we thought that was kind of overkill, to go to outer space to reach a mile away,” says Jerry Hendricksen, network computer technician with Medical X-Ray.

Hendricksen researched and evaluated a pack of wireless bridge companies, and narrowed the choice to BridgeWave and one other. Both had radios that could meet the requirements. BridgeWave got the nod in part because of the vendor’s detailed focus on calculating the exact distances between the sites, and the heights at which the radios would be mounted in order to optimize both throughput and reliability.