Pulsed ultrasound-modulated optical tomography using spectral-hole burning as a narrowband spectral filter.

We applied a submegahertz nonlinear optical filter afforded by a cryogenically cooled spectral-hole burning crystal to ultrasound-modulated optical tomography. Our experimental results show that this technique, having the largest etendue among all available ultrasound-modulated optical tomography techniques and being immune to speckle decorrelation, offers potential for imaging in vivo and forming high resolution optical tomograms in real time. It opens an opportunity for the development of a clinically applicable high resolution optical imaging modality.