Patent ID: 8406537

Claim:
A computed tomography (CT) system, comprising: a rotational gantry comprising: an X-ray source configured to emit an X-ray beam through a subject; an X-ray detector comprising one or more detector elements configured to receive incoming X-rays and to convert the incoming X-rays to image signals; a data acquisition unit comprising data reduction circuitry configured to perform lossy, lossless, or both lossy and lossless compression of the image signals to generate compressed image data, and wherein the data acquisition unit comprises a data acquisition control board configured to consolidate the compressed image data from a plurality of interface boards into a single stream and to provide the single stream of compressed image data to a non-volatile memory device, wherein each interface board is configured to receive image signals from a different subset of the detector elements; the non-volatile memory device configured to store the compressed image data; and a stationary structure communicatively coupled to the rotational gantry via one or more slip rings configured to transfer the compressed image data from the rotational gantry to stationary memory integral with the stationary structure.