10 | Public Involvement, Engagement and Innovation

Our display showcases AIVAL, a fundamentally new approach to AI governance that positions Scotland at the forefront of healthcare innovation. This groundbreaking software platform—piloted through a pioneering collaboration between Metalynx, NHS Scotland, leading AI vendors, and the University of Edinburgh—represents a paradigm shift in how AI systems are evaluated and monitored in high-stakes clinical environments. The project is funded by a 1.5m Innovate UK grant.

Attendees will experience a live demonstration of this innovation that addresses a critical barrier to AI adoption: the lack of standardized, independent validation processes. AIVAL's revolutionary continuous monitoring approach transcends traditional one-time certification, visualizing how AI systems drift over time and potentially compromise patient safety.

The economic impact of this innovation is substantial—reducing AI evaluation costs by up to 80% while accelerating deployment timelines by months. By enabling clinicians to confidently adopt beneficial AI systems while rejecting unreliable ones, AIVAL directly supports NHS Scotland's strategic priorities in stroke triage and cancer detection pathways.

Our interactive display will demonstrate AIVAL's unique explainability features that reveal why AI systems make specific decisions without compromising vendor intellectual property—a capability unavailable in any other solution. Visitors will see how Scotland is establishing world-leading expertise in AI governance through this collaboration, creating a framework that provides transparent, independent assurance.

This transformative technology, proven in Scottish NHS settings, creates both economic growth through commercialization and improved public healthcare outcomes—positioning Scotland as a global leader in ethical, effective AI adoption that ensures equitable benefits across all patient populations.

Exhibitor: Luciana D'Adderio

Our display showcases Scotland's pioneering work in reimagining clinical processes for AI-driven stroke diagnosis—revealing a fundamental paradigm shift discovered through our five-year, in-depth study across major UK stroke hubs. The study is funded through Luciana D'Adderio's Chancellor's Fellowship and her associated CSO grant.

Attendees will experience an interactive demonstration of how Scotland is leading the clinical transformation needed for effective AI implementation. Unlike typical technology-focused displays, our exhibit reveals the revolutionary ""diagnosis-first"" process we've documented, where AI's initial assessment triggers verification pathways that are fundamentally reshaping clinical roles and expertise. these findings were published in a recent Nature Digital Medicine piece, coauthored with Harvard colleague David Bates.

The display features striking visual comparisons of traditional vs. AI-augmented diagnostic journeys, showing how Scotland's clinicians are adapting to a world where the diagnostic label arrives at the beginning rather than the end of the process. Visitors will see real examples of how stroke teams across NHS Scotland sites are developing sophisticated verification practices that maintain clinical oversight while embracing AI's capabilities.

Our research captures this critical moment in healthcare evolution, where Scottish stroke teams are establishing world-leading expertise in harmonising human judgment with algorithmic outputs, with tremendous implications for healthcare professions and the healthcare system. The visualisation demonstrates how the ""dial spanning human and machine agency"" is shifting, with Scottish clinicians pioneering new approaches that transcend traditional diagnostic processes.

This groundbreaking work has significant implications for clinical training, expertise development, and healthcare system design—positioning Scotland at the forefront of establishing practices that will define the future of AI-enabled healthcare globally while ensuring patient safety remains paramount.

Exhibitor: Luciana D'Adderio

This showcase includes:

• a poster of PPI work: Beyond Remuneration for Patient and Public Involvement Group Members
• Tattoos for Tattoo my research
• Scientific animation

Exhibitors: Tracy Jackson, Laura Gonzalez Rienda & Livvy Swann

Paediatric critical care units (PCCU) provide life-saving treatments to seriously ill and injured infants, children, and young people.

PCCU routinely generate a large amount of data through standard clinical care providing invaluable resources for improvement research and innovation. Usher Institute is the ‘home’ of the first British data-driven research, innovation, and engagement programme in children’s critical care medicine. Our programme’s leadership team consists of senior clinicians (doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals), academics (engineers, AI specialists, data scientists, neuroscientists etc), industry, and Patients-Public-Interactions and Engagement (PPIE) experts. Our funders include EU’s ERA-NET, UK’s MRC and CSO.

In this non-specialist display, we summarise our unique programme’s exciting achievements and work in childhood brain trauma, as an example, which includes:

1. successfully establishing and leading an international interdisciplinary consortium that includes a clinical translational-research network of over 20 PCCU in 10 countries to contribute real-life routinely collected data for research and innovation;
2. co-developing AI innovations with ‘clinical-grade’ C-3P-O (Clinical-Physiology-EEG Phase synchrony-Psychology-neurOimaging) data to revolutionise PCCU care from ‘reactive’ to ‘pro-active’ treatments;
3. co-creating Remote and Rural compatible Data-Driven (R2-D2) AI innovation to objectively quantify brain injury severity and recovery monitoring using only 2-channels of brainwave tests;
4. successfully integrating PPIE, through Intensive-Share (the first UK based PPIE group for PCCU), within all our research and innovation work to ensure clinical relevance and build trust in medical technology and innovations; and
5. co-delivering an exciting Joint intErnational interDisciplinary traIning (J.E.D.I.) platform to build research, innovation, and engagement workforce of the future. 

Exhibitor: Milly Lo

Paediatric Critical Care (PCC) is a unique clinical environment where families are given a deluge of clinical and technical information at a stressful time. This makes communicating about PCC research particularly challenging.

Intensive-Share was established as the first Paediatric Critical Care (PPC) Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) group in Scotland to help researchers consider the views of people with lived experience in what research they do, how they do it, and how they communicate. Members of Intensive-Share explained they didn’t understand what researchers meant when they talked about ‘data’ and how processing written information could be difficult in a PCC environment.

We will showcase our co-production project, ‘What is Data?’. The project aimed to co-create and pilot an animated communication tool to aid public understanding of the secondary research use of routinely generated healthcare data in PCC. Children and young people contributed to the storyboard, script development, graphic design and narration of the video and had a significant impact on the visuals, language and delivery. The video has been well received and is available as an open-resource.

Young people involved in the project team will attend the showcase and attendees can expect to:

• Explore ‘what is data?’ through short art activities and word association games.
• Learn about some of the challenges in science communication and engagement by taking part in a ‘translation task’.
• Hear an overview of how we worked with families to produce the animation, what lessons were learned in the project, and view the final animation. 

Exhibitor: Laura Smith

The Surgical Sabermetrics Laboratory aims to enhance surgical performance and patient safety through integration of surgery, and behavioural and data science. Our research uses innovative technology, including wearable sensor analytics, cognitive load monitoring and video-based tagging, allowing unbiased assessment and enhancement of decision-making and teamwork in high-risk surgical environments. By harnessing these technologies, our research will advance multifaceted assessments of surgical performance.

This display includes:

• Public Engagement Activity: Demonstration of wearable sensors (i.e. heart rate variability) during a simulated 'keyhole surgery' task using a simulator. Delegates will see in real-time changes in surgeon physiology as the tasks increase in difficulty.
• Non-Academic Poster: Overview of the Surgical Sabermetrics Laboratory Research
• Academic Poster: Light, heat and noise – the impact of operating theatre environmental factors on performance.
• Academic Poster: Novel metrics of operative performance in surgical training: a pan-specialty, international, Delphi consensus study.

Exhibitors: Steven Yule, Claire Davies Tyler, Calum Arthur, Connor Boyle and Lachlan Dick

Intermittent physiological monitoring and early warning scores (EWS) are limited in their ability to detect deteriorating patients in a timely manner. Wearable physiological sensors allow continuous remote monitoring and may be more timely and accurate in the identification of those at risk, in comparison to manual collection. This study aims to determine if wearable physiological sensors can be used for the early detection of postoperative deterioration, while being acceptable to patients and healthcare staff.

Here we present a report on our ongoing work across surgical departments in 8 countries – key members of the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery. Our mixed-methods approach has resulted in a rich body of qualitative findings around future implementation of continuous physiological monitoring, especially in lower-resourced settings. Early quantitative analysis of sensor data has shown a promising capacity to identify deterioration in surgery patients.

Additionally, we will demonstrate the wearable sensors being used in the study as well as tools developed for real-time data visualisation.

Exhibitors: Eilidh Gunn, Mia Amamio and Reena Mathias

Surgery is an indispensable part of healthcare but it is lacking resources. It is estimated that an additional 143 million additional surgical operations are needed each year and that 1.5 million deaths would be prevented if these operations were available. There is an urgent need to train surgeons as this expertise is scarce. Of the 143 million additional operations required to meet basic needs and save lives, 28 million (20%) could be done using minimally invasive (laparoscopic) techniques which are associated with less pain, lower infection rates and shorter length of stay. Surgeons need comprehensive training in this area through skill-based models and measurable assessment of skill acquisition to effectively track and understand the development of competencies.

This study will therefore evaluate approaches to increase surgical capacity based on the creation of new models for keyhole surgical skills acquisition for both MD and non-MD trainees.

Here we present a summary of ongoing research across 7 countries in the Global South – key members of the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery. Qualitative work has revealed important findings around implementation of current-generation laparoscopic simulation technology. Comparisons of current-generation and next-generation technologies will inform development of future training platforms.

Additionally, we will demonstrate the current-generation laparoscopic simulation box trainer used in this study.

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is rapidly expanding globally, yet little is known about how to scale this technology safely and equitably across diverse health systems. We conducted the first prospective global study to identify health system factors associated with safe MIS implementation using MIS cholecystectomy as a tracer procedure. Data from over 52,000 patients was collected by over 10,000 healthcare workers.

Here we present results from the GECKO study, delivered by the GlobalSurg Collaborative. Important findings around safe implementation of MIS offer actionable targets for health systems seeking to equitably scale essential surgical technologies.

Find out about CPR at our interactive stall. Learn about the GoodSAM responder app and find out more about our work at the Resuscitation Research Group. 

Exhibitor: Dominika Skrocka