Abstract: A CT scanner in which the amount of X-ray information acquired per unit time is substantially increased by using a continuous on X-ray source, and a sampled data system with the detector. Because the detector is of the high resolution variety with more than 500 cells, use of a reasonable sampling rate produces data at a rate faster than can be stored to disk by the system computer. The array processor, which forms a part of the standard CT architecture, is interfaced to the data acquisition system and configured to provide real time filtering of the acquired detector data, the filter serving a compressing function to reduce the data rate to one acceptable by the host computer.