You may have already seen the Tolly Group's report on how SpeedScreen Progressive Display enables delivery of PACS images to healthcare workers over a variety of network types. But for me it is even more exciting to hear from customers actually experiencing this technology in the field. Recently I learned of a hospital network using XenApp 4.5 (formerly known as Presentation Server) to deliver radiography images from their Agfa IMPAX 6.2 image and information management system. I haven't asked permission to publish the name of the customer but I can share their observations with you. Interestingly, IMPAX 6 is billed by Agfa as a web-deployable PACS system since it offers a Java plug-in for Internet Explorer, yet the hospital found that performance over their WAN is significantly better using XenApp to publish the IMPAX application (Win32). On Windows XP PCs with at least a Pentium III processor and 256 MB of RAM (the oldest production PCs still in service across the 7,000 PCs on their network), performance is "exceptional". In fact, XenApp has successfully delivered "cine loops" where a series of up to 300 splices of a CT scan is displayed at 27 frames per second -- a very challenging use case! These observations were made with the users situated 5 miles down the road from the hospital's data center, connected over a gigabit network and through a 10 Mbps switch.
Have you started using SpeedScreen Progressive Display in your business? If so, please post a comment or send me an email.
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
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One note I'd like to add regarding the scenario above is that it is very important to configure the user policies in XenApp appropriately according to the use case. Radiographers/radiologists demand 100% pixel perfect images. There are two settings for SpeedScreen Image Acceleration and SpeedScreen Progressive Display that control how compression is applied. They are described in the Administrator's Guide for 4.5 FP1 on pages 177 and 178. You can think of them as the "fuzzy setting" for images in motion and the "sharp setting" for images that are still. For medical imaging, you would want to turn off lossy compression on still images. A radiographer/radiologist would want lossless compression even though it takes a little longer for the extra bits to be sent across the wire. Or put another way, they'd need decent bandwidth to get the optimal user experience of pixel perfect images and fast response time.