Photorefractive acousto-optical imaging for thick biological tissues

A new concept of acousto-optical imaging is emerging based on an interferometric setup containing a photorefractive crystal as the recombination plate, and a single detector. This wavefront-adaptive holography technique is promising since the measurements are made in real-time with a high flux collection and at a high rate, faster than the speckle decorrelation time. We present here a detailed model that describes correctly the measured signal, whether in a temporal phase or amplitude modulation of the ultrasound.