Experimental study of z resolution in acousto-optical coherence tomography using random phase jumps on ultrasound and light

Acousto-optical coherence tomography (AOCT) is a variant of acousto-optic imaging (also called ultrasound modulated optical tomography) that makes possible to get resolution along the ultrasound propagation axis z. We present here AOCT experimental results, and we study how the z resolution depends on time step between phase jumps T-phi, or on the correlation length Delta z. By working at low resolution, we perform a quantitative comparison of the z measurements with the theoretical point spread function. We also present images recorded with different z resolution, and we qualitatively show how the image quality varies with T-phi, or Delta z. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America