Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 30, 2021
Decision Letter - Giuseppe Vitiello, Editor

PONE-D-21-10465

EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Benninger,

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Kind regards,

Giuseppe Vitiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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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: I Don't Know

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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

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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 biological information transduction behaves quantum-like, therefore, it is well described and understood according to the principle and operations of quantum mechanism. The manuscript is a marvelous application of the research achievement of trying to understand the biological information processing in terms of quantum mechanism. I believe the success of this application in diagnosis of psychiatric patients should be widely open. Further, the success of discrimination between various types of such diseases is especially surprising, which can be used in research development to understand the detailed mechanism of the origin and development of such various diseases.

Minor concern is: “Does the control contain not only healthy people but also other brain patients than the psychiatric patients reported in this manuscript, such as brain cancer, migraine, and so on?” This is important at the practical application for the medical diagnosis of each individual patient. At least the authors should mention about this at the discussion section.

English is awkward at several places. Corrections by a native speaker should help the improvement.

Reviewer #2: The paper introduces new a quantum potential mean and variability score (qpmvs), to identify neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive disorders with high accuracy, based on EEG recordings. It is fascinating, highly interdisciplinary, paper involving quantum physics, neurophysiology, among other areas. My report is dedicated only to the physics/mahematics of the qpmvs. In my view, the description of the underlying physical model requires serious improvements. I suggest including an appendix explaining the model and its numerical implementation. Please see the attached file.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Ichiro Yamato

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: PONE-D-21-10465_Report.pdf
Revision 1

Response to Reviewers - EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline

Dear Reviewers,

Thank you very much for your encouraging comments and your great help to improve the manuscript. According to your suggestions, we made appropriate changes highlighted in the manuscript with markups.

We added a section in the discussion to comply with the constructive comments from reviewer number one. The inclusion of healthy control patients was discussed as limitation complying with the very well-placed comment (“One limitation of our study is related to the heterogenic group of healthy controls. This group is comprised of patients which underwent routine EEG without a clear indication and no neuro-psychiatric disorders but might include those with unspecific headaches including migraine and tension-type headache or dizziness. Currently we cannot exclude an influence of those complaints on the qpmvs.”

The manuscript was also edited to improve language.

We would like to thank the second reviewer for his constructive remark regarding the use of the same symbol (p) for two different mathematical entities. This might have caused a disturbance by the reader. As the letter p is standard for both areas, statistics and number theory we decided to use a bold and italic fond when referring to p-adic and now expect a clearer distinguishability between these two notations. As the comment on the use of 2-adic numbers throughout the paper, we added a remark (parentheses 2 last lines of page 4). We would like to preserve the presentation for an arbitrary p, since it can be useful in some applications. In this context, “Q_p” for the field of p-adic numbers, was exchanged with both letters as capital “QP”.

We further re-wrote the methods part regarding the 2-adic quantum potential calculation sub-section and the section describing the quantum potential mean and variability score (qpmvs). To improve the understanding regarding the 2-adic quantum potential calculation, we added as suggested a series of algorithm steps with detailed explanations regarding each step and improved the mathematical terms in each equation. Moreover, we defined rigidly the averages and standard deviation terms. These changes have been made to meet with the remarks #2 and #4 of reviewer number 2.

We also like to comment on the seconds reviewer remark #3 (“The computation of the quantum potential requires the numerical computation of derivatives of functions having jumping-type singularities, these derivatives naturally contain Dirac delta functions”). As can be seen from the changes in the 2-adic quantum potential calculation sub-section, step 9, equations 5-7, the numerical calculation do not involve such Dirac delta functions. Moreover, the meaning of the QP function is explained in step 9 as “Thus, the ambiguous quantum potential notion becomes in our framework quite trivially a score or measure of hierarchical topology”. This meaning of the QP is a direct implication of our numerical 2-adic quantum potential computation but can be extended to the non-numerical cases.

The data availability was updated and improved and the original data files are anonymized and available as a three-dimensional matrix as a matlab file at https://datadryad.org/stash/share/AWmC0-Afzx29cOkYDXQ6y2-7HF4GBvG-J-9i8hDQZsw which has been added to the manuscript.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Giuseppe Vitiello, Editor

EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline

PONE-D-21-10465R1

Dear Dr. Benninger,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. 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.

Kind regards,

Giuseppe Vitiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear Dr. Felix Benninger,

it is a pleasure to communicate you that your paper has been accepted to be published on PLOS ONE.

Best regards

Giuseppe Vitiello

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

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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)

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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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)

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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)

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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: You addressed adequately to my concern. Thank you for your providing a nice diagnostic analysis method for psychological diseases. I hope you continue investigation further on the control patients to discriminate clearly the psychological diseases from other kinds of brain diseases. Looking forward to reading your further reports.

I suggest you to be more careful about simple English errors such as: Introduction section, 2nd paragraph, Baring -> Bearing; Method section, 2-adic part, 4. normalized -> Normalized; time step, t, normalized -> time step, t, were normalized; and several others; Fig.1 legend, 3rd line, Qmet,group the for comparison -> Qmet,group for comparison.

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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: Yes: Ichiro Yamato

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Giuseppe Vitiello, Editor

PONE-D-21-10465R1

EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline

Dear Dr. Benninger:

I'm 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 let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, 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.

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Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Giuseppe Vitiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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