DICOM Traffic Performance and WAAS Application Deployment Guide

This is a guide for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) traffic performance and Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) application deployment. The paper shows the way DICOM protocol works over a wide area network (WAN) within the Cisco WAAS environment. The relative performances seen in DICOM when used with WAAS are all explained in detail in the paper. The component roles and configurations used in the lab environment are also explained for complete clarity. The document can be used by system engineers, account managers, and healthcare IT managers to understand how the Cisco WAAS can improve DICOM traffic performance over a WAN link. Cisco WAAS uses TCP optimization techniques and application acceleration features to take care of any challenge faced during transportation of traffic over a WAN. The DICOM standard is used in healthcare organizations for the exchange of images such as CT, MRI, cat scan etc. Such information can be transported through Cisco WAAS. Cisco WAAS also help healthcare organizations in reducing the amount of bandwidth required to deliver highly dense DICOM images over WANs, increase the amount of traffic throughput experienced by the branch modalities for when storing or receiving DICOM images. Further, it also allow for consolidation of backend Picture Archival Communications Systems (PACS) used for the DICOM image storage into centralized data centers.