Patent ID: 7844097

Claim:
A method for compressing projection data in a computed tomography system, the computed tomography system providing a plurality of sensor measurements to form one or more sets of projection data, wherein each set of projection data represents a portion of a projection domain and includes an array of samples, the array having at least one line, the samples including more-significant samples and less-significant samples, the method comprising: setting one or more compression control parameters to control compression operations, the compression control parameters including at least one compression control parameter corresponding to the more-significant samples and at least one compression control parameter corresponding to the less-significant samples; classifying the samples of at least one line in the set of projection data into at least two subsets in accordance with a classification control parameter, the subsets including at least one more-significant subset containing the more-significant samples and at least one less-significant subset containing the less-significant samples; compressing the samples of each subset by applying the compression operations in accordance with the corresponding compression control parameter to form a corresponding subset of compressed data, wherein a compression ratio for the less-significant subset is greater than a compression ratio for the more-significant subset; and adjusting one or more of the compression control parameters in accordance with a feedback parameter based on a characteristic of the compressed data.