5. Conclusions and outlook

Acousto-optical imaging of biological media at depths of several centimetres is still under development, and there is still a long way to go before we can achieve systems as advanced as ultrasound and MRI devices. This is due to the small amount of light to be analyzed, and also to a number of technological hurdles not yet fully mastered, but which will gradually be resolved, with the development of powerful, spectrally well-defined quasi-continuous laser sources, faster CMOS cameras with ever more pixels, and of course ever more efficient GPU-based data processing.

As we have seen, there are two possible approaches to detection and information extraction, one coherent (based on interferometry) and the other incoherent (based on a spectral filter). At present, it seems worthwhile to pursue the development of these two architectures in parallel. Indeed, the coherent...