PONE-D-19-30241

Non-destructive lock-picking of a historical treasure chest by means of X-ray computed tomography

PLOS ONE

Dear Prof. Kaiser,

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

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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

Reviewer #3: 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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: I like this interesting and curious paper and support its publication. The explanation of the work is clear, but it is unfortunately let down by poor written English throughout the paper. I feel that the paper needs to be thoroughly proof-read before it can be published.

It is not clear to me how figure 5 was generated. Presumably it was made with some 3D modelling software but was it made by hand after looking carefully at the CT scan or generated directly from CT?

Please check PLOS's open data requirements. You say that the data are available from the author, but PLOS ONE might insist that you upload them to a repository.

Reviewer #2: This paper reflects the results of an X-ray CT study for a very bulky object, a wooden box (chest) with a quite complicated locking device, which should be opened without damaging the structure after understanding the mechanism. The object has some cultural heritage value and the key is missing. In this respect, the work is an interesting collaboration of CT experts with persons from the restoration and museum side.

The paper is well written and structured and gives most of the details in order to understand the object’s structure and composition and the applied non-invasive technique, including the image processing steps.

The challenge of the study is the large size of the object (bigger than the field-of-view or beam diameter) and the thickness of the material layers to be penetrated. In this respect, the study is cutting-edge and the limitations and problems are highlighted accordingly.

Despite of the good quality of the submitted draft of the paper, there are some aspects to improve the manuscript further:

1. Abstract: this study is by far not “a new approach” (since CT is available since decades), but a nice demo for using the method at the limit of the beam penetration. Further, the application to cultural heritage objects and the interaction with museums people could be highlighted more.

2. More details should be given in the material and method description: which materials are involved in detail (Fe, Cu, wood, …); Why 1800 single projections were produced? What are the X-ray beam parameters (cone, focal spot, beam geometry, distances of source, sample, detector, …)? What is the performance of the reconstruction method?

3. Table 1: please, add also the thickness of the individual components of the lock!

4. Furthermore, it would be interesting to compare extracted virtual parts with the real parts of the lock – this describes the quality of the study.

5. Fig. 7 shows only the performance of the workshop … better show the digital layout derived from the CT volume data … and compare to reality.

6. Fig. 6 doesn’t give a global overview of the lock and its parts. A comparison of Fig. 4 with the “virtual reality” should be given. Better views and maybe dedicated slices should be added and explained. Otherwise, the study remains incomplete.

7. From the methodical point, it could be added, that the study was performed in a regime where the sample is larger than the beam as a FOV tomography run. Because of the high number of taken projections, the missing information by the highly attenuating range seems to be overcome?

Reviewer #3: The paper describes an interesting application of X-ray Computed Tomography to the non-destructive examination of the lock mechanism of a 19th century chest with missing key. The aim was to obtain a precise and detailed model of the lock mechanism in order to understand its functionality and to manufacture a new key copy for opening the chest without any damage. 3D-CT is nowadays a well-consolidated technique also in the field of Cultural Heritage and it has been applied in a lot of case-studies. However, the present study is quite new and interesting because of the nature of the analyzed object and the high radiopacity of its constituent material that typically may produce artifacts in the reconstructed images decreasing their quality. In this case the authors were able to obtain tomographic images of good quality, so to characterize completely the lock mechanism.

The paper is well written and the results are original, so I suggest to accept the manuscripts with minor revisions.

In the following, my observations and suggestions.

Introduction

Line 31: I suggest writing “The sample projections…..are….” instead of “The sample projection …is...” and to specify that the data are acquired over an angular range of 360 degrees.

Line 40: Unlike the Reference 17, the CT system used for the analysis mentioned in Reference 16 was developed by a research group in Bologna, not in Turin.

Materials and methods

Line 104: I suggest using “projections” instead of “positions”

Line 108: In my opinion, Reference 31 is not entirely relevant, as it does not report the use of metal filters to reduce scattering artefacts, as stated by the authors. Moreover, to my knowledge, metal filters are generally used to reduce beam hardening, while collimators are more useful to reduce scattered radiation.

Lines 112-113: The sentence “Within this software…..was applied [32]” needs further explanations. In particular, what does it mean “…..in a different material mode (number 8.5)….”?

Line 127: Fig. 4(a) should be replaced by Fig. 3(a)

References

Line 300: the word “editors” should be deleted

Line 328: Insert “;” between “organizace” and “2014”

Line 331: Insert “;” between “techniques” and “2012”.

Finally, I suggest that the authors include (if possible) the data from the CT scan of the treasure chest as supplementary information.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Attachments

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Non-destructive lock-picking of a historical treasure chest by means of X-ray computed tomography

PONE-D-19-30241R1

Dear Dr. Kaiser,

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

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Joseph P. R. O. Orgel, Ph.D.

Section 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: (No Response)

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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: (No Response)

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: (No Response)

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: All concerns have been adequately addressed.

Reviewer #2: The authors accepted the reviewers comments and improved accordingly. Details of the applied technique and the explanation of the function of the object are given much better.

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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: Yes: Eberhard H. Lehmann, PSI, CH