Scott McLachlan

Queen Mary, University of London | QMUL · School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

In 2021 we presented an interim analysis of reported deaths associated with Covid-19 using data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). This work applies the same analytical approach used on the original 250 reports from the December 2020 to March 2021 VAERS dataset, to a larger collection containing 1012 reports from the December...

The latest ONS vaccine mortality surveillance report for England (for the period 1 Jan 2021 to 31 May 2022) fails to take account various confounding factors in the 'headline' results and can thus be easily misinterpreted. Those seeking evidence that the vaccines are unsafe might point to the overall all-cause mortality rate in the vaccinated (1,36...

Information visualisation creates visual representations that more easily convey meaningful patterns and trends hidden within large and otherwise abstract datasets. Despite potential benefits for understanding and communicating health data, information visualisation in medicine is underdeveloped. This is especially true in midwifery, where no quali...

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE) has developed new aspects of its WP.29 agreement for harmonising vehicle regulations, focusing on the regulation of vehicle manufacturers’ approaches to ensuring vehicle cyber security by requiring implementation of an approved cyber security management system (CSMS). This paper investigate...

In December 2020 the law for drone pilots and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) use went into a transition phase in preparation for new EU international UAV regulation. That EU regulation comes into full effect as the transition periods defined in the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority Air Policy CAP722 expire during December 2022 (CAA, 2020). H...

Countries like America, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have proposed ostensibly similar legislation that will mandate adoption of a state centrally-managed digital identification. In many cases, even before these digital ID Bills have been debated and decisions to enact are made, digital driver’s licenses (DDL) are being trialled or distr...

Existing literature review (LR) methods and tools do not comprehensively support the collaborative LR (CLR) analysis and synthesis tasks. This paper presents STaR, a CLR approach that addresses this gap with a framework that support collaborative data collection and synthesis in the CLR process. STaR is a framework that makes use of a mixture of me...

The accuracy of any data purporting to show covid 19 vaccine effectiveness or safety is critically dependent on the accuracy of four measurements: (1) people classified as having the disease; (2) vaccination status; (3) reported deaths; and (4) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated (the so called 'denominators'). Errors in any of these coul...

Driving is an intuitive task that requires skill, constant alertness and vigilance for unexpected events. The driving task also requires long concentration spans, focusing on the entire task for prolonged periods, and sophisticated negotiation skills with other road users including wild animals. Modern motor vehicles include an array of smart assis...

Countries like America, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have proposed ostensibly similar legislation that will mandate adoption of a state centrally-managed digital identification. In many cases, even before these digital ID Bills have been debated and decisions to enact are made, digital driver’s licenses (DDL) are being trialled or distr...

Artificial intelligence (AI) features are increasingly being embedded in cars and are central to the operation of self-driving cars (SDC). There is little or no effort expended towards understanding and assessing the broad legal and regulatory impact of the decisions made by AI in cars. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to determine t...

Modelling that exploits visual elements and information visualisation are important areas that have contributed immensely to understanding and the computerisation advancements in many domains and yet remain unexplored for the benefit of the law and legal practice. This paper investigates the challenge of modelling and expressing structures and proc...

The risk/benefit of Covid vaccines is arguably most accurately measured by comparing the all-cause mortality rate of vaccinated against unvaccinated, since it not only avoids most confounders relating to case definition but also fulfils the WHO/CDC definition of "vaccine effectiveness" for mortality. We examine two of the most recent UK ONS vaccine...

This paper has been updated and the new version can be found here: Official mortality data for England suggest systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination UPDATED WITH ONS DECEMBER DATA RELEASE & HEALTHY VACCINEE/MORIBUND ANALYSIS http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28055.09124 https://www.re...

Aims Gestational diabetes (GDM) is the most common metabolic disorder of pregnancy, requiring complex management and empowerment of those affected. Mobile health (mHealth) applications (Apps) are proposed for streamlining healthcare service delivery, extending care relationships into the community, and empowering those affected by prolonged medical...

UPDATE: A significantly revised version of this report is here:http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/inconsistencies_vaccine.pdf To determine the overall risk-benefit of Covid-19 vaccines it is crucial to be able to compare the all-cause mortality rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in each different age category. However, current pub...

Never has so much been made by so few using so little data to affect the lives of so many. We are living in a period of unprecedented change. Public and health policy in response to COVID-19 has seen whole countries effectively shut down. Many of us have lived through two or more lockdowns-periods of time when the general public were restrained by...

Given the limitations of the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for Covid19 vaccines, we must increasingly rely on data from observational studies to determine vaccine effectiveness. But over-simplistic reporting of such data can lead to obviously flawed conclusions due to statistical paradoxes. For example, if we just compare the total number of...

Driving is an intuitive task that requires skills, constant alertness and vigilance for unexpected events. The driving task also requires long concentration spans focusing on the entire task for prolonged periods, and sophisticated negotiation skills with other road users, including wild animals. These requirements are particularly important when a...

No comprehensive review of Bayesian networks (BNs) in healthcare has been published in the past, making it difficult to organize the research contributions in the present and identify challenges and neglected areas that need to be addressed in the future. This unique and novel scoping review of BNs in healthcare provides an analytical framework for...

Clinically trained reviewers have undertaken a detailed analysis of a sample of the early deaths reported in VAERS (250 out of the 1644 deaths recorded up to April 2021). The focus is on the extent to which the reports enable us to understand whether the vaccine genuinely caused or contributed to the deaths. Contrary to claims that most of these re...

There has been much research effort expended toward the use of Bayesian networks (BNs) in medical decision-making. However, because of the gap between developing an accurate BN and demonstrating its clinical usefulness, this has not resulted in any widespread BN adoption in clinical practice. This paper investigates this problem with the aim of fin...

Visual representation of the law and legal process can aid in recall and discussion of complicated legal concepts, yet is a skill rarely taught in law schools. This work investigates the use of flowcharts and similar process-oriented diagrams in contemporary legal literature through a literature review and concept-based content analysis. Informatio...

Patients suffering from chronic conditions may need to make frequent decisions about the management of their condition in partnership with their health professionals. However, this may not be possible as appointments are not always scheduled according to necessity but instead at a fixed frequency. Remote monitoring technology has the potential to g...

This is about the widely publicised claim that "1 in 3 people with Covid-19 have no symptoms".

In computational linguistics, language models are probabilistic models that predict the likelihood of words occurring within specific sentences. They are key components of many natural language processing systems. Traditional full word models do not work well for agglutinative languages. These are languages that have words built out of distinctly i...

Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the laboratory and in the field. In this piece we show that there...

Modelling that exploits visual elements and information visualisation are important areas that have contributed immensely to understanding and the computerisation advancements in many domains and yet remain unexplored for the benefit of the law and legal practice. This paper investigates the challenge of modelling and expressing structures and proc...

Visual representation of the law and legal process can aid in recall and discussion of complicated legal concepts, yet is a skill rarely taught in law schools. This work investigates the use of flowcharts and similar process-oriented diagrams in contemporary legal literature through a literature review and concept-based content analysis. Informatio...

This short paper explains (using a Bayesian analysis) why the UK Government claim of an imminent exponenential increase in number of Covid19 cases that would overwhelm the NHS is not supported by evidence.

To appear in Trends in Cognitive Science. Abstract: Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the lab and...

When analysing Covid-19 death rates by ethnicity in the USA it has been shown that, although the aggregated death rate for whites is higher than for blacks, in each main age subcategory the death rate for blacks is higher than for whites. This apparent statistical anomaly is an example of Simpson's paradox. While the paradox reveals blacks are more...

Concerns about the practicality and effectiveness of using Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID19 have been well documented and, in the UK, led to the abandonment of the NHS CTA shortly after its release in May 2020. One of the key non-technical obstacles to widespread adoption of CTA has been concerns about privacy. We present...

Bayesian Networks (BNs) are graphical probabilistic models that have proven popular in medical applications. While numerous medical BNs have been published, most are presented fait accompli without explanation of how the network structure was developed or justification of why it represents the correct structure for the given medical application. Th...

Widely reported statistics on Covid-19 across the globe fail to take account of both the uncertainty of the data and possible explanations for this uncertainty. In this article, we use a Bayesian Network (BN) model to estimate the Covid-19 infection prevalence rate (IPR) and infection fatality rate (IFR) for different countries and regions, where r...

Information visualisation is transforming data into visual representations to convey information hidden within large datasets. Information visualisation in medicine is underdeveloped. In midwifery, the impact of different graphs on clinicians' and patients' understanding is not well understood. We investigate this gap and its potential consequences...

Problem: Bayesian Networks (BN) can address real-world decision-making problems, and there is enormous and rapidly increasing interest in their use in healthcare. Yet, despite thousands of BNs in healthcare papers published yearly, evidence of their adoption in practice is extremely limited and there is no consensus on why. Method: A preliminary re...

Computational models that need to incorporate domain knowledge for realistic solutions to problems often lead to technologies that get transferred to developing countries. The support for managing the knowledge incorporated into these technologies is important for customisation to suit local conditions. This work investigates this problem through t...

Bayesian networks (BNs) have received increasing research attention that is not matched by adoption in practice and yet have potential to significantly benefit healthcare. Hitherto, research works have not investigated the types of medical conditions being modelled with BNs, nor whether there are any differences in how and why they are applied to d...

Bayesian Networks (BNs) are graphical probabilistic models that have proven popular in medical applications. While numerous medical BNs have been published, most are presented fait accompli without explanation of how the network structure was developed or justification of why it represents the correct structure for the given medical application. Th...

Widely reported statistics on Covid-19 across the globe fail to take account of both the uncertainty of the data and possible explanations for this uncertainty. In this paper we use a Bayesian Network (BN) model to estimate the Covid-19 infection prevalence rate (IPR) and infection fatality rate (IFR) for different countries and regions, where rele...

Many digital solutions mainly involving Bluetooth technology are being proposed for Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Concerns have been raised regarding privacy, consent, uptake required in a given population, and the degree to which use of CTAs can impact individual behaviours. The introduction of a new CTA alone will n...

Many digital solutions mainly involving Bluetooth technology are being proposed for Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Concerns have been raised regarding privacy, consent, uptake required in a given population, and the degree to which use of CTAs can impact individual behaviours. However, very few groups have taken a holi...

Standardising care can improve patient safety and outcomes, and reduce the cost of providing healthcare services. Caremaps were developed to standardise care, but contemporary caremaps are not standardised. Confusion persists in terms of terminology, structure, content and development process. Unlike existing methods in the literature, the approach...

COVID-19 testing strategies are primarily driven by medical need - focusing on people already hospitalized with significant symptoms or on people most at risk. However, such testing is highly biased because it fails to identify the extent to which COVID-19 is present in people with mild or no symptoms. If we wish to understand the true rate of COVI...

At some point in the history of most nations, one or more events of illegal electronic surveillance by those in power or law enforcement has occurred that has the effect of setting State against Citizen. The media sensationalise these incidents for profit, however they more often correctly express the concern felt by the general public. At these ti...

A person is labelled as having COVID-19 infection either from a positive PCR-based diagnostic test, or by a health professional's assessment of the clinical picture in a process described by some as symptom screening. There is considerable fragility in the resulting data as both of these methods are susceptible to human biases in judgment and decis...

Standardisation of healthcare has been the focus of hospital management and clinicians since the 1990's. Electronic health records were already intended to provide clinicians with real-time access to clinical knowledge and care plans while also recording and storing vast amounts of patient data. It took more than three decades for electronic health...

There is a strong push towards standardisation of treatment approaches, care processes and documentation of clinical practice. However, confusion persists regarding terminology and description of many clinical care process specifications which this research seeks to resolve by developing a taxonomic characterisation of clinical care process specifi...

No comprehensive review of Bayesian networks (BNs) in healthcare has been published in the past, making it difficult to organize the research contributions in the present and identify challenges and neglected areas that need to be addressed in the future. This unique and novel scoping review of BNs in healthcare provides an analytical framework for...

Bayesian networks (BNs) have received increasing research attention that is not matched by adoption in practice and yet have potential to significantly benefit healthcare. Hitherto, research works have not investigated the types of medical conditions being modelled with BNs, nor whether any differences exist in how and why they are applied to diffe...

Several countries are currently investigating issues of neglect, poor quality care and abuse in the aged care sector. In most cases it is the State who license and monitor aged care providers, which frequently introduces a serious conflict of interest because the State also operate many of the facilities where our most vulnerable peoples are cared...

Computational models that need to incorporate domain knowledge for realistic solutions to problems often lead to technologies that get transferred to developing countries. The support for managing the knowledge incorporated into these technologies is important for customisation to suit local conditions. This work investigates this problem through t...

Problem: Learning health systems (LHS) are an underexplored concept. How LHS will operate in clinical practice is not well understood. This paper investigates the relationships between LHS, clinical care process specifications (CCPS) and the established levels of medical practice to enable LHS integration into daily healthcare practice. Methods:...

Getting access to real medical data for research is notoriously difficult. Even when data exist they are usually incomplete and subject to restrictions due to confidentiality and privacy. Synthetic data (SD) are best replacements for real data but must be verifiably realistic. There is little or no investigation into systematically achieving realis...

In secondary uses of data, access to real data is problematic due to data being non-existent, incomplete, or avoiding privacy and confidentiality breaches. Synthetic data (SD) are best replacements for real data but must be verifiably realistic. There is little or no investigation into systematically achieving realism in SD. This work investigates...

Objective Gestational diabetes is the most common metabolic disorder of pregnancy, and it is important that well-written clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are used to optimise healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. The aim of the study was to assess the methodological quality of hospital-based CPGs on the identification and management...

Introduction Learning health systems (LHS) are one of the major computing advances in health care. However, no prior research has systematically analysed barriers and facilitators for LHS. This paper presents an investigation into the barriers, benefits, and facilitating factors for LHS in order to create a basis for their successful implementation...

This year around 200,000 people worldwide will die from an opioid-related overdose. As pharmaceutical company funding and gifts given directly to prescribing doctors is being exposed as an issue to the degree that it must be declared in some countries, their influence in other ways is biasing continuing medical education (CME) and having a deleteri...

Objective: Learning Health Systems (LHS) are one of the major computing advances in healthcare. This paper presents an investigation into the barriers, benefits and facilitating factors for LHS in order to create a basis for successful implementation and adoption of LHS. Method: First, the ITPOSMO-BBF framework was developed based on the establishe...

The accessibility of personal health information (PHI) will increase on the Internet of the future to provide timely support for both primary and secondary uses. Although PHI for secondary uses is generally anonymized, its widespread distribution on the Internet raises ethical concerns. The PHI should remain an individual’s most closely guarded ass...

Parents and physicians may differ in opinion over the medical care that a child receives. Such disagreement often occurs at the emotional intersection between what is in the child's best interests, compassion, and the want to prolong young life at (almost) any cost. This paper investigates and seeks to classify cases and issues where courts have be...