Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 11, 2019
Decision Letter - Quan Jiang, Editor

PONE-D-19-19654

Axial variation of deoxyhemoglobin density as a source of BOLD low-frequency time lag structure.

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr Aso,

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  1. Some figures and references need to be revised.

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Kind regards,

Quan Jiang, Ph,D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The research is original. Experiments are well designed and the conclusions are supported by the data. I appreciated the extensive use of citations to back up the introduction and discussion sections.

Minor comments:

Although all the details of the figures are given in the text and in the legends, some figures would benefit from a few additions:

Fig1: There could be a confusion in Part A between the spatial extent of vasculature and the time variations in 1-3. It would be clearer if the time arrows were bigger. I didn’t understand the usefulness of the second schematic in gray area.

Fig2: Putting a legend related to the colorlines in partB woud help.

Fig3: Part A. This was especially difficult to follow. The colorbars are missing as well as the axis names. I would remove the resampling part and add graphs about instantaneous phase differences times series and the corresponding averages. Part B. There is no colorbar to explain the different line colors.

Some references are not properly cited:

Hoge R, Atkinson J, Gill B, Crelier G & Marrett S (1999). Investigation of BOLD signal

dependence on cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption: The …. Magnetic

Resonance in Medicine 863, 849–863. Misssing part of the title

Kennerley AJ, Berwick J, Martindale J, Johnston D, Papadakis 868 N & Mayhew JE (2005).

Concurrent fMRI and Optical Measures for the Investigation of the Hemodynamic

Response Function. 365, 354–365. No Journal title

Willie CK, Tzeng Y-C, Fisher JA & Ainslie PN (2014). Integrative regulation of human

brain blood flow: Integrative regulation of human brain blood flow. The Journal of

Physiology 592, 841–859. repetition in the title

Reviewer #2: This is an important and exciting contribution that not only acknowledges the vascular-derived lag-based structure inherent in the BOLD response but proposes a thoughtful method for combining this information with an optimized global signal regression approach that shows promise in reducing inter-individual variation while preserving task-based BOLD responses to visuomotor and respiratory tasks. The analyses and statistical approach was rigorously conducted with appropriate treatment of multiple comparisons. I did not find any methodological errors or unreasonable interpretations of the data that should slow publication of what could be a new technical standard in treatment of fMRI signal data.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Jeffrey S Anderson

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Revision 1

Responses to reviewers

We thank the reviewers for the encouraging and constructive comments. In addition to the modifications below, the main text and the citation style were re-formatted to meet the journal’s standards.

Reviewer #1

>Fig1: There could be a confusion in Part A between the spatial extent of vasculature and the

> time variations in 1-3. It would be clearer if the time arrows were bigger. I didn’t understand

> the usefulness of the second schematic in gray area.

Thanks to the Reviewer, we noticed that there was much room for improvement in the Figures. As pointed out, the arrows in the top panels indicated blood flow/vasomotion (over space), while that in the bottom panel indicated time. We removed the arrows from the panels 1-3, illustrating the vessel content, which seemed redundant. The broken rectangle in the top panel was also too big (vertically) and indeed confusing for the readers to understand the three panels. The text in the gray box was changed to clearly mention the purpose of inserting this scheme. This was to explain the difference between lag mapping and perfusion MRI using contrast agent. Figure legend was also modified for clarity.

>Fig2: Putting a legend related to the colorlines in partB woud help.

>Fig3: Part A. This was especially difficult to follow. The colorbars are missing as well as

>the axis names. I would remove the resampling part and add graphs about instantaneous phase

>differences times series and the corresponding averages. Part B. There is no colorbar to explain

>the different line colors.

We modified the figures accordingly. Part A was changed to clearly indicate that the combination of a lag map and the corresponding time courses constitute a lag structure for each individual fMRI run (shaded rectangle). An example of instantaneous phase difference timeseries (after time-locked averaging) was inserted. Colorbar was added to the Fig 3B.

Citations are fixed, thank you.

Decision Letter - Quan Jiang, Editor

[EXSCINDED]

Axial variation of deoxyhemoglobin density as a source of the low-frequency time lag structure in blood oxygenation level-dependent signals

PONE-D-19-19654R1

Dear Dr. Aso,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Quan Jiang, Ph,D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Authors have appropriately addressed reviewer concerns. I have no further concerns that require addressing.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Quan Jiang, Editor

PONE-D-19-19654R1

Axial variation of deoxyhemoglobin density as a source of the low-frequency time lag structure in blood oxygenation level-dependent signals

Dear Dr. Aso:

I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper at this point, to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

For any other questions or concerns, please email plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE.

With kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Quan Jiang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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