In order to operate at full capacity, appointments in radiology departments are being booked with increasingly shorter intervals between patient examinations. A system malfunction as a result of an undetected virus can lead to appointment delays or a downtime situation of the system which can last one day or even longer. In order to prevent this from happening, Siemens offers Virus Protection – a service that protects imaging systems from viruses, worms, trojan horses, etc. At Ege University Medical School in the Turkish port city Izmir, such an unpleasant event occurred. Unfortunately, there was no virus protection software in place.

After the radiology team at Ege University had been working reliably with the magnetic resonance imaging system MAGNETOM® Symphony since 2002, a virus attack caused a scanner shutdown. “Prior to this, we hadn’t had any troubles that necessiated Virus Protection installation on our systems,“ reports Professor Nilgün Yunten, MD, from Ege University, “However, this case showed us how important effective protection against malicious software attacks is, and how it contributes to increased system reliability and availability. Because we installed Siemens Virus Protection after this occurrence, the system runs stably and our workflow is no longer interrupted.”

Siemens Virus Protection is no ordinary product, as virus protection for medical equipment is much more complex than that for a home PC. For this reason, Siemens relies on a special virus scanner from TrendMicro™, Inc. The scanner is regularly updated with the latest virus patterns. As soon as a virus is detected, users as well as Siemens experts who have a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection to the system are notified. The virus is removed and the system functionality is restored. This can often occur remotely. However, virus prevention is much more important and is carried out through proactive monitoring and regular updates from the so-called Microsoft® hotfixes. Relevant updates are continuously passed on to customer systems. After the system outage, the Turkish Ege University now relies on Siemens Virus Protecion and with that, expects a smooth workflow.