Enhancing Healthcare Real-Time Data Delivery with API Gateway

Introduction

In the healthcare industry, precision and accuracy in radiation therapy are critical for ensuring optimal patient outcomes. A leading organization in medical technology sought to enhance its ability to quantify radiation doses and optimize treatment protocols by integrating real-time dosimetry data. As medical applications continue to evolve, seamless communication between systems becomes essential for delivering real-time updates and ensuring efficient data processing. This article explores how PREDICTif collaborated with the organization to develop a cloud-based backend architecture that processes and delivers radiation data to the frontend application. The solution leverages Amazon API Gateway to facilitate secure and real-time communication, enabling efficient interaction between IoT devices, backend services, and frontend clients.

The Challenge: Building a Robust, Real-Time Data Delivery System

The customer’s application needed to deliver radiation data from an IoT-enabled device to the frontend in real-time. The radiation data, generated by a specialized patch, had to be processed and displayed dynamically. The key challenges included:

· Real-Time Data Processing: The need to deliver real-time updates to users, ensuring that data is displayed as soon as it is generated.

· Scalable and Secure Communication: Secure and scalable communication between the frontend and backend services was essential to handle potentially large traffic loads while protecting sensitive data.

· Efficient Data Storage and Retrieval: The customer needed a secure way to store and retrieve configuration files, such as pre-processed DICOM data, and serve them to the frontend in an optimized way.

PREDICTif’s goal was to design a solution that would ensure seamless data delivery, minimize latency, and maintain security compliance, all while offering flexibility for future scalability.

The Solution: A Scalable, Real-Time Communication Architecture on AWS

PREDICTif developed a backend architecture using AWS services, focusing on the use of Amazon API Gateway for managing real-time communication, data retrieval, and efficient system integration. The architecture was designed to ensure that both real-time data updates and configuration file requests could be handled efficiently with low latency.

1. Real-Time Data Streaming via WebSocket API

a. Data Ingestion: Radiation data is ingested via AWS IoT Core and streamed through Kinesis Data Streams.

b. Lambda Fan-Out Consumer: An enhanced Lambda function consumes the data and pushes real-time updates to connected frontend clients using a WebSocket API.

c. Connection Management: A set of Lambda functions handles connection lifecycle management, with active WebSocket connection IDs tracked in DynamoDB for targeted message delivery.

2. Configuration File Retrieval via HTTP API

a. Data Storage: Configuration files, such as DICOM data, are stored in Amazon S3 for efficient access.

b. API Integration: When a user initiates a treatment, the frontend requests the initial configuration file through an HTTP API, which triggers a Lambda function that retrieves the file from S3.

3. API Gateway WebSocket and HTTP Integration

a. WebSocket API for Real-Time Updates: The WebSocket API was selected for its persistent, bidirectional communication capabilities, ensuring that radiation data is instantly delivered to the frontend. This minimizes latency and scales efficiently for concurrent users.

b. HTTP API for Configuration File Requests: The HTTP API is optimized for infrequent but critical requests, such as retrieving configuration files before a treatment session. It integrates directly with Lambda and S3 to reduce unnecessary compute overhead.

PREDICTif ensured that all interactions were secure by integrating IAM roles with the least privilege principle for API Gateway’s Lambda function invocations and using API Keys for HTTP API access.

Key Design Features: Cost Efficiency and Scalability

The backend architecture utilized AWS features to maintain low costs and scalability while meeting real-time requirements:

· Regional Endpoints: Regional endpoints were selected for both the WebSocket and HTTP APIs to optimize latency, cost efficiency, and data security. This allows traffic to remain within designated AWS regions, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations, particularly in healthcare contexts.

· Rate Limiting and Throttling: The architecture includes strict rate limits and throttling to prevent system overload. The WebSocket API allows up to 500 requests per second, while configuration file retrieval is limited to 100 requests per second, with appropriate burst handling.

· Asynchronous Processing: Key backend services, including data streaming and connection management, were built with asynchronous processing to handle peak traffic efficiently.

Results: Secure, Scalable, and Efficient Communication

By implementing AWS API Gateway, PREDICTif successfully delivered a solution that:

· Ensures Real-Time Data Delivery: WebSocket APIs provide the necessary low-latency updates, allowing users to view real-time radiation data.

· Scales with Traffic Load: The system can handle multiple concurrent connections and scale automatically to meet increased demand.

· Improves Data Retrieval: HTTP APIs offer a lightweight, cost-effective method for retrieving critical configuration files.

· Optimizes Security: The integration of custom Lambda Authorizers, AWS WAF, and IAM policies ensures secure access control and protection against malicious traffic.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis

By leveraging a serverless architecture with API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3, the customer benefited from reduced infrastructure costs and simplified management. The pay-as-you-go model allowed for significant cost savings, especially with the dynamic nature of API traffic. Serverless services eliminated the need for dedicated servers, while Kinesis Data Streams enhanced scalability without additional infrastructure overhead.

Lessons Learned

· Optimize for Real-Time Needs: WebSocket APIs are ideal for applications requiring real-time updates, as they provide persistent connections with low latency, even at scale.

· Leverage Serverless for Cost Efficiency: Serverless services like AWS Lambda and API Gateway significantly reduce infrastructure management costs and allow for automatic scaling.

· Ensure Secure Communication: Implementing robust security measures, such as Lambda authorizers and IAM role-based access control, is critical when dealing with sensitive data.

· Plan for Scalability: The ability to scale rapidly is vital, especially when handling high-frequency, low-latency updates. Testing and optimizations should be conducted to ensure the system can handle peak loads.

Conclusion

This article demonstrates how PREDICTif’s expertise in AWS API Gateway helped create a secure, scalable, and efficient solution for delivering real-time radiation data. By integrating WebSocket and HTTP APIs, the customer now has a robust backend architecture that supports real-time communication, seamless data retrieval, and secure interactions, all while optimizing costs and ensuring compliance. Moving forward, PREDICTif will continue to support the customer in expanding their cloud-based services, leveraging AWS innovations to enhance their platform’s capabilities.