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Background: Surgical waiting lists have risen dramatically across the UK as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The effective use of operating theatres by optimal scheduling could help mitigate this, but this requires accurate case duration predictions. Current standards for predicting the duration of surgery are inaccurate. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential for greater accuracy in predicting surgical case duration. This study aimed to investigate whether there is evidence to support that AI is more accurate than current industry standards at predicting surgical case duration, with a secondary aim of analysing whether the implementation of the models used produced efficiency savings. Method: PubMed, Embase, and MEDLINE libraries were searched through to July 2023 to identify appropriate articles. PRISMA extension for scoping reviews and the Arksey and O'Malley framework were followed. Study quality was assessed using a modified version of the reporting guidelines for surgical AI papers by Farrow et al. Algorithm performance was reported using evaluation metrics. Results: The search identified 2593 articles: 14 were suitable for inclusion and 13 reported on the accuracy of AI algorithms against industry standards, with seven demonstrating a statistically significant improvement in prediction accuracy (P < 0.05). The larger studies demonstrated the superiority of neural networks over other machine learning techniques. Efficiency savings were identified in a RCT. Significant methodological limitations were identified across most studies. Conclusion: The studies suggest that machine learning and deep learning models are more accurate at predicting the duration of surgery; however, further research is required to determine the best way to implement this technology. Waiting lists for elective surgeries are rising in the UK. We conducted a scoping review with the aim to understand if artificial intelligence has the potential to improve the utilization of operating theatre resources through improved scheduling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For efficient operation, solar power operators often require generation forecasts for multiple sites with varying data availability. Many proposed methods for forecasting solar irradiance / solar power production formulate the problem as a time-series, using current observations to generate forecasts. This necessitates a real-time data stream and enough historical observations at every location for these methods to be deployed. In this paper, we propose the use of Global methods to train generalised models. Using data from 20 locations distributed throughout the UK, we show that it is possible to learn models without access to data for all locations, enabling them to generate forecasts for unseen locations. We show a single Global model trained on multiple locations can produce more consistent and accurate results across locations. Furthermore, by leveraging weather observations and measurements from other locations we show it is possible to create models capable of accurately forecasting irradiance at locations without any real-time data. We apply our approaches to both classical and state-of-the-art Machine Learning methods, including a Transformer architecture. We compare models using satellite imagery or point observations (temperature, pressure, etc.) as weather data. These methods could facilitate planning and optimisation for both newly deployed solar farms and domestic installations from the moment they come online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the dynamic prediction of customer activity in electronic payment transactions for individual clients. Our approach is founded on customer online payment transaction records from registered UK-based online retailers between 01/12/2009 and 09/12/2011. These retailers primarily specialize in unique gift items for various occasions, catering to a wide range of clients, including wholesalers. We used classification analysis based on the correlation coefficient to measure and describe a customer's electronic payment capability based on the quality of products they purchase. Furthermore, we trained multi-layered models (linear model, deep learning, random forest, and support vector machines (SVM)) to capture the dynamics of e-bank transaction reinforcement for retail customers using machine learning. Real transaction data from a UK online retailer was employed in our study. The experimental results consistently demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rainfall-runoff (R-R) modelling is used to study the runoff generation of a catchment. The quantity or rate of change measure of the hydrological variable, called runoff, is important for environmental scientists to accomplish water-related planning and design. This paper proposes (i) an integrated model namely EO-ELM (an integration of equilibrium optimizer (EO) and extreme learning machine (ELM)) and (ii) a deep neural network (DNN) for one day-ahead R-R modelling. The proposed R-R models are validated at two different benchmark stations of the catchments, namely river Teifi at Glanteifi and river Fal at Tregony in the UK. Firstly, a partial autocorrelation function (PACF) is used for optimal number of lag inputs to deploy the proposed models. Six other well-known machine learning models, called ELM, kernel ELM (KELM), and particle swarm optimization-based ELM (PSO-ELM), support vector regression (SVR), artificial neural network (ANN) and gradient boosting machine (GBM) are utilized to validate the two proposed models in terms of prediction efficiency. Furthermore, to increase the performance of the proposed models, paper utilizes a discrete wavelet-based data pre-processing technique is applied in rainfall and runoff data. The performance of wavelet-based EO-ELM and DNN are compared with wavelet-based ELM (WELM), KELM (WKELM), PSO-ELM (WPSO-ELM), SVR (WSVR), ANN (WANN) and GBM (WGBM). An uncertainty analysis and two-tailed t-test are carried out to ensure the trustworthiness and efficacy of the proposed models. The experimental results for two different time series datasets show that the EO-ELM performs better in an optimal number of lags than the others. In the case of wavelet-based daily R-R modelling, proposed models performed better and showed robustness compared to other models used. Therefore, this paper shows the efficient applicability of EO-ELM and DNN in R-R modelling that may be used in the hydrological modelling field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Learning (DL) has been broadly applied to solve big data problems in biomedical fields, which is most successful in image processing. Recently, many DL methods have been applied to analyze genomic studies. However, genomic data usually has too small a sample size to fit a complex network. They do not have common structural patterns like images to utilize pre-trained networks or take advantage of convolution layers. The concern of overusing DL methods motivates us to evaluate DL methods' performance versus popular non-deep Machine Learning (ML) methods for analyzing genomic data with a wide range of sample sizes. In this paper, we conduct a benchmark study using the UK Biobank data and its many random subsets with different sample sizes. The original UK Biobank data has about 500k participants. Each patient has comprehensive patient characteristics, disease histories, and genomic information, i.e., the genotypes of millions of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs). We are interested in predicting the risk of three lung diseases: asthma, COPD, and lung cancer. There are 205,238 participants have recorded disease outcomes for these three diseases. Five prediction models are investigated in this benchmark study, including three non-deep machine learning methods (Elastic Net, XGBoost, and SVM) and two deep learning methods (DNN and LSTM). Besides the most popular performance metrics, such as the F1-score, we promote the hit curve, a visual tool to describe the performance of predicting rare events. We discovered that DL methods frequently fail to outperform non-deep ML in analyzing genomic data, even in large datasets with over 200k samples. The experiment results suggest not overusing DL methods in genomic studies, even with biobank-level sample sizes. The performance differences between DL and non-deep ML decrease as the sample size of data increases. This suggests when the sample size of data is significant, further increasing sample sizes leads to more performance gain in DL methods. Hence, DL methods could be better if we analyze genomic data bigger than this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Mapping agencies (NMA) are frequently tasked with providing highly accurate geospatial data for a range of customers. Traditionally, this challenge has been met by combining the collection of remote sensing data with extensive field work, and the manual interpretation and processing of the combined data. Consequently, this task is a significant logistical undertaking which benefits the production of high quality output, but which is extremely expensive to deliver. Therefore, novel approaches that can automate feature extraction and classification from remotely sensed data, are of great potential interest to NMAs across the entire sector. Using research undertaken at Great Britain's NMA; Ordnance Survey (OS) as an example, this paper provides an overview of the recent advances at an NMA in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) based applications. Examples of these approaches are in automating the process of feature extraction and classification from remotely sensed aerial imagery. In addition, recent OS research in applying deep (convolutional) neural network architectures to image classification are also described. This overview is intended to be useful to other NMAs who may be considering the adoption of similar approaches within their workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has created new opportunities to map cultural ecosystem services (CES) related to biodiversity at large scales. However, using these novel data to understand people's preferences in relation to these CES remains a challenge.To address this, we trained a deep learning model to capture people's interactions with selected flora and fauna on Flickr as a cultural service related to biodiversity and compared this with citizen science data on iNaturalist, with photos of individual species considered as human–species interactions.After mapping the distribution of people's interactions in Great Britain on Flickr and iNaturalist, we find significant spatial differences in people's preferences on the two platforms.Using a second, pretrained deep learning model, we were also able to identify different preferences for species groups such as birds on social media versus citizen science.To better understand people's preferences, we also compared people's interactions with species richness and abundance for a group of 36 bird species, sometimes finding large differences between people's interactions and these ecological measures.Our findings demonstrate that social media can be used to include a wider range of preferences in CES assessments along‐side citizen science data. However, these preferences reflect only a limited first‐hand experience of biodiversity. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-term load forecasting ensures the efficient operation of power systems besides affording continuous power supply for energy consumers. Smart meters that are capable of providing detailed information on buildings energy consumption, open several doors of opportunity to short-term load forecasting at the individual building level. In the current paper, four machine learning methods have been employed to forecast the daily peak and hourly energy consumption of domestic buildings. The utilized models depend merely on buildings historical energy consumption and are evaluated on the profiles that were not previously trained on. It is evident that developing data-driven models lacking external information such as weather and building data are of great importance under the situations that the access to such information is limited or the computational procedures are costly. Moreover, the performance evaluation of the models on separated house profiles determines their generalization ability for unseen consumption profiles. The conducted experiments on the smart meter data of several UK houses demonstrated that if the models are fed with sufficient historical data, they can be generalized to a satisfactory level and produce quite accurate results even if they only use past consumption values as the predictor variables. Furthermore, among the four applied models, the ones based on deep learning and ensemble techniques, display better performance in predicting daily peak load consumption than those of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer (LC) is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the UK due to delayed diagnosis. The existing literature establishes a variety of factors which contribute to this, including the misjudgement of anatomical structure by doctors and radiologists. This study set out to develop a solution which utilises multiple modalities in order to detect the presence of LC. A review of the existing literature established failings within methods to exploit rich intermediate feature representations, such that it can capture complex multimodal associations between heterogenous data sources. The methodological approach involved the development of a novel machine learning (ML) model to facilitate quantitative analysis. The proposed solution, named EMM-LC Fusion, extracts intermediate features from a pre-trained modified AlignedXception model and concatenates these with linearly inflated features of Clinical Data Elements (CDE). The implementation was evaluated and compared against existing literature using F1 score, average precision (AP), and area under curve (AUC) as metrics. The findings presented in this study show a statistically significant improvement (p < 0.05) upon the previous fusion method, with an increase in F-Score from 0.402 to 0.508. The significance of this establishes that the extraction of intermediate features produces a fertile environment for the detection of intermodal relationships for the task of LC classification. This research also provides an architecture to facilitate the future implementation of alternative biomarkers for lung cancer, one of the acknowledged limitations of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By constructing digital twins (DT) of an integrated energy system (IES), one can benefit from DT's predictive capabilities to improve coordinations among various energy converters, hence enhancing energy efficiency, cost savings and carbon emission reduction. This paper is motivated by the fact that practical IESs suffer from multiple uncertainty sources, and complicated surrounding environment. To address this problem, a novel DT-based day-ahead scheduling method is proposed. The physical IES is modelled as a multi-vector energy system in its virtual space that interacts with the physical IES to manipulate its operations. A deep neural network is trained to make statistical cost-saving scheduling by learning from both historical forecasting errors and day-ahead forecasts. Case studies of IESs show that the proposed DT-based method is able to reduce the operating cost of IES by 63.5%, comparing to the existing forecast-based scheduling methods. It is also found that both electric vehicles and thermal energy storages play proactive roles in the proposed method, highlighting their importance in future energy system integration and decarbonisation. • A deep learning and digital twins (DT) based scheduling method is proposed. • Physical IES performance is addressed by its virtual replica's predictive capability. • A machine learning method is proposed to address multiple uncertainty challenges. • Historical U.K. datasets are used for performance evaluations. • Results demonstrate the Digital Twin model reduces the extra operating cost by 63.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large volumes of Sentinel-1 data produced over Europe are being used to develop pan-national ground motion services. However, simple analysis techniques like thresholding cannot detect and classify complex deformation signals reliably making providing usable information to a broad range of nonexpert stakeholders a challenge. Here, we explore the applicability of deep learning approaches by adapting a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect deformation in a national-scale velocity field. For our proof-of-concept, we focus on the U.K. where previously identified deformation is associated with coal-mining, ground water withdrawal, landslides, and tunneling. The sparsity of measurement points and the presence of spike noise make this a challenging application for deep learning networks, which involve calculations of the spatial convolution between images. Moreover, insufficient ground truth data exist to construct a balanced training data set, and the deformation signals are slower and more localized than in previous applications. We propose three enhancement methods to tackle these problems: 1) spatial interpolation with modified matrix completion; 2) a synthetic training data set based on the characteristics of the real U.K. velocity map; and 3) enhanced overwrapping techniques. Using velocity maps spanning 2015–2019, our framework detects several areas of coal mining subsidence, uplift due to dewatering, slate quarries, landslides, and tunnel engineering works. The results demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed framework to the development of automated ground motion analysis systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proposed an intelligent diagnosis framework for skin lesion classification. • Designed a multi-class multi-level algorithm to enhance the accuracy. • Proposed improved techniques for noise removal from the images. • Deep learning and other machine learning approaches developed and compared. • So far, the best multi-class result (∼96.5% accuracy) achieved using deep learning. Skin diseases remain a major cause of disability worldwide and contribute approximately 1.79% of the global burden of disease measured in disability-adjusted life years. In the United Kingdom alone, 60% of the population suffer from skin diseases during their lifetime. In this paper, we propose an intelligent digital diagnosis scheme to improve the classification accuracy of multiple diseases. A Multi-Class Multi-Level (MCML) classification algorithm inspired by the "divide and conquer" rule is explored to address the research challenges. The MCML classification algorithm is implemented using traditional machine learning and advanced deep learning approaches. Improved techniques are proposed for noise removal in the traditional machine learning approach. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on 3672 classified images, collected from different sources and the diagnostic accuracy of 96.47% is achieved. To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, its metrics are compared with the Multi-Class Single-Level classification algorithm which is the main algorithm used in most of the existing literature. The results also indicate that the MCML classification algorithm is capable of enhancing the classification performance of multiple skin lesions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicotine consumption is considered a major health problem, where many of those who wish to quit smoking relapse. The problem is that overtime smoking as behaviour is changing into a habit, in which it is connected to internal (e.g., nicotine level, craving) and external (action, time, location) triggers. Smoking cessation apps have proved their efficiency to support smoking who wish to quit smoking. However, still, these applications suffer from several drawbacks, where they are highly relying on the user to initiate the intervention by submitting the factor the causes the urge to smoke. This research describes the creation of a combined Control Theory and deep learning model that can learn the smoker's daily routine and predict smoking events. The model's structure combines a Control Theory model of smoking with a 1D-CNN classifier to adapt to individual differences between smokers and predict smoking events based on motion and geolocation values collected using a mobile device. Data were collected from 5 participants in the UK, and analysed and tested on 3 different machine learning model (SVM, Decision tree, and 1D-CNN), 1D-CNN has proved it's efficiency over the three methods with average overall accuracy 86.6%. The average MSE of forecasting the nicotine level was (0.04) in the weekdays, and (0.03) in the weekends. The model has proved its ability to predict the smoking event accurately when the participant is well engaged with the app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]