Case Study: World leading performance enabling life-changing medical work
29 April 2025
By Jenna Polson | Case Study | No Comments
WHO: Melbourne Theranostic Innovation Centre
WHAT: Bigfish Technology designed and delivered IT infrastructure to enable the world leading medical scanner to improve cancer care.
WHEN: 2022 – 2023
The opportunity
The latest high-precision medical imaging can reveal the vital clues for early cancer diagnosis to enable better targeted treatment with lower radiation exposure.
The Melbourne Theranostic Innovation Centre (MTIC) had the opportunity to bring the state-of-the-art Siemens Biograph Quadra Vision PET/CT to Melbourne. At the time MTIC would be one of only ten locations globally to have the scanner installed.
This high precision device demands the best in IT infrastructure to operate effectively, efficiently and securely.
They didn’t just deliver a service; they became trusted partners in our mission to deliver cutting-edge care. We simply couldn’t have asked for a better IT provider
– Jason Callahan, Head of Clinical and Research Operations at MTIC
The challenge
The IT requirements included:
- Performance: Ultra-high speed processing power was vital to support the Quadra and minimise wait times for patients and staff.
- Storage capacity: These high-resolution image studies equate to a lot of data: up to 1 Terabyte (TB) per patient study. MTIC needed capacity for 20 studies (up to 20TB) per day.
- Backup and Resilience: The solution must enable those 20TB of studies to be replicated and stored offsite each day for protection and redundancy. This brings its own set of challenges:
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- What internet provisions would allow offsite data transmission fast enough to complete outside business hours, and avoid impact to operations?
- How should retention policies trade off backup frequency and duration with the cost of storage infrastructure required to house it?
- How should such volumes of data be compressed and encrypted to reduce storage demands and protect patient data?
- What other measures should be implemented to minimise downtime and mitigate business continuity risks?
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- Scalability: The solution had to be expandable, to cater for future demands as required, without requiring a disproportionate upfront investment.
The solution
Bigfish Technology worked with Siemens Healthcare and MIM Software to design and deliver the IT infrastructure to meet MTIC’s needs. Key features included:
- Ultra-fast (25 Gbps) internal network to enable study data to be processed and displayed to clinicians promptly.
- High-throughput scalable storage platform capable of writing at speeds to match the network speed.
- High-speed internet, paired with a disaster recovery solution to compress and encrypt data for secure offsite transport outside business hours.
- Proactive IT maintenance and support for the complex, high-demand environment, with capacity monitoring to enable further scaling when required.
The results
The Siemens Quadra Vision PET/CT was successfully installed in January 2023, putting our solution to the test. Bigfish Technology’s infrastructure set a new global standard; the Siemens Healthineers found the speeds twice as fast as the systems supporting Quadra machines anywhere else in the world.
And that makes a real difference to the experience at MTIC; clinicians and patients get their results faster during a challenging time. It also helps MTIC maximise the value from their technology investments.
MTIC’s Head of Clinical and Research Operations, Jason Callahan said, “From the ground up, our entire IT infrastructure at the Melbourne Theranostics Innovation Centre (MTIC) was designed, built, and seamlessly executed by Bigfish. Their depth of expertise, professionalism, and forward-thinking approach ensured that every system – from secure clinical data handling to imaging integration and administrative workflows – was robust, scalable, and future-ready. They didn’t just deliver a service; they became trusted partners in our mission to deliver cutting-edge care. We simply couldn’t have asked for a better IT provider.
This year, as MTIC the results from its first 300 scans, Bigfish’s solution continues to work seamlessly. As MTIC’s trusted IT partner, Bigfish proactively maintains their IT solutions to ensure continued security, productivity and performance.
