Re-architecting a HIPAA-compliant radiology pipeline processing 10TB of medical imaging data per day

The Situation

Life Imaging FLA operates preventive health screening centers across Florida, processing thousands of scans daily. Their DICOM transfer pipeline was failing under load — 40% retry rates, partial corruptions, and 30-minute delays per scan — threatening their expansion from 10 centers to 50.

What We Did

• —Stepped in as Fractional CTO to diagnose the failing DICOM pipeline and design a production-grade replacement
• —Architected a hybrid Azure IoT Edge pipeline with edge modules at each imaging center for local ingestion, validation, and compression
• —Built an idempotent messaging layer with zero data loss guarantees, even during network outages
• —Implemented JPEG-LS lossless compression, reducing file sizes by 50% without diagnostic quality loss
• —Delivered end-to-end HIPAA compliance with full audit trails and encryption at rest and in transit

Outcomes

• —Reduced transfer failure rates from 40% to under 5% — an 87.5% improvement
• —Cut scan transfer times from 30+ minutes to under 10 minutes per study
• —50% reduction in storage costs through lossless compression across all centers
• —Pipeline scaled to handle 10TB/day, ready to grow from 10 to 50 centers