As a result of the pausing of national cancer screening programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, referrals from breast screening services dropped by 55.8% in Scotland during 1 April to 30 June, according to a quarterly report on cancer waiting times published on 29 September from Public Health Scotland.
In addition, colorectal cancer screening referrals declined by 58.5% and cervical cancer screening referrals dropped by 22.7%, according to the report. Breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening services were paused in March due to COVID-19 and no new invitations for the three screening programs were sent out during the quarter. Breast cancer screening did resume on 3 August.
Of the patients who were referred during the quarter with positive breast cancer screening exams, 91.5% began treatment within 62 days of referral, down from 97.3% in the previous quarter. NHS Scotland has a standard that states that 95% of patients urgently referred with a suspicion of cancer or screened positive through a national screening program should wait a maximum of 62 days from referral to first cancer treatment.
![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)
