LSU Health Mobile Mammography. USA

Healthcare | Cellular Bonding

LSU Health Shreveport operates a number of mobile mammography vehicles in medically underserved North Louisiana. Due to a lack of cellular network coverage, the vehicles have long battled with connectivity issues.

LSU Health sought a solution with a robust and fail-safe connection for their life-saving deployments. Peplink helps them achieve this and more with ease.

“..with multiple embedded cellular devices, bonding the signals to effect higher bandwidths. This allows us to send digital images from remote locations that typically have poor cellular coverage.”

LSU Health Mobile Mammography
LSU Health Connection for Mobile Mammography in Rural Louisiana #2

Challenge

LSU Health Shreveport operates mobile mammography vehicles as part of their health outreach service. A big difficulty is communicating from these mobile life-savers to the university back at Shreveport, an essential part of the cancer screening process.

The areas served are rural and remote, with poor cellular coverage. Effectively transmitting medical images back to the university is especially challenging in this environment.

When lives depend on timely diagnosis, the connection between the mammography vehicle and the university must be fast and unbreakable. Faced with this challenge, LSU Health called Peplink partner Peter West and asked for a solution.

LSU Health Connection for Mobile Mammography in Rural Louisiana #3

Requirements

Stay online in rural areas with poor cellular coverage.

Send X-ray images (~600MB for each patient) without interruption.

Always-on connection to university network and databases.

Support multiple computers and devices on-board.

LSU Health Connection for Mobile Mammography in Rural Louisiana #4

Solution

The mammography vehicles were equipped with either a MAX HD4, or two MAX BR1s with a MAX HD2. The vehicles can then form unbreakable VPN connections with the Balance 580 at the university and bond the bandwidths of the 4 cellular connections. With this setup, the vehicles can remotely access vital information, such as patient registration and databases, as well as seamlessly communicate using VoIP. Most importantly, the vehicles can reliably send X-rays and 600MB 3D tomographic images back to the university’s Picture Archiving and Communications (PAC) system.

This is possible using Pepwave routers to bond cellular connections from multiple providers, delivering maximum bandwidth and stability in areas where cellular coverage is poor. And when they’re lucky enough to work in areas with Wi-Fi, the MAX’s Wi-Fi as WAN feature provides the vehicles with equally reliable access.

LSU Health Connection for Mobile Mammography in Rural Louisiana #5

Result

By enabling mobile mammography teams to reliably communicate with the university, Peplink / Pepwave helps LSU Health save lives throughout North Louisiana.  The 600MB file now takes just 4 minutes to upload,  down from 10 minutes.On the same time the upload speed is now up to 22Mbps in rural areas.

Deployment

Special thanks to