This projects started in 1987 with the development of what is known as Lumpy Backgrounds, a statistical model of background non-uniformity. This model was developed for quantitative image quality assessment in medical imaging and hardware optimization.

A few years after the development of the lumpy backgrounds, the project was extended in 1996 to successfully synthesize other textures such as mammogram-like backgrounds.

Additional References

Jannick Rolland, Factors Influencing Lesion Detection in Medical Imaging, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona (1990)