Scotland's breast cancer screening rates continue to fall, with only 71.2% of eligible women attending routine screening between 2015 and 2018, according to a news story posted on October 9 in the Scotsman.
This rate is down from the previous three-year period of 71.7% and lower than the 74.9% seen between 2008 and 2011.
Four health boards, including National Health Service (NHS) Greater Glasgow and Clyde, NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Lothian, and NHS Fife, have not met the minimum acceptable uptake standard of at least 70% of women between the ages of 50 and 70. The rate is lowest in Glasgow at 65.8%, according to the Scotsman.
Data from NHS Scotland's Information Services Division indicate that, between 2016 and 2018, only 58.5% of women in the most disadvantaged parts of the country underwent screening mammography, compared with 79.1% of women in areas with better resources, the newspaper reported.
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
