Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 2, 2022
Decision Letter - Ayan Seal, Editor

PONE-D-22-06226AI-based analysis of oral lesions using novel deep convolutional neural networks for early detection of oral cancerPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Warin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ayan Seal, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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: Yes

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: 1.The study presents the results of primary scientific research.

2.Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

3.Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

4.Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

5.The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

6.The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

7.The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

Reviewer #2: Briefly try to describe the models which are used in object detection by what all layers they comprise of, and in what fashion.

If possible try to highlight the importance of one or more layers and in what way they are supportive for your case.

Also try to give some mathematical expression/equations support to your research.

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6. 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: Dr. Rajashekhargouda C. Patil

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

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Revision 1

Respond to Reviewers

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Response: Thanks for your suggestion, we checked the references to ensure they meet the requirements of the journal.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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

________________________________________

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

________________________________________

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: Yes

________________________________________

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

________________________________________

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: 1.The study presents the results of primary scientific research.

2.Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

3.Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

4.Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

5.The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

6.The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

7.The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

Response: We appreciated the reviewer for the comments.

Reviewer #2: Briefly try to describe the models which are used in object detection by what all layers they comprise of, and in what fashion.

If possible try to highlight the importance of one or more layers and in what way they are supportive for your case.

Also try to give some mathematical expression/equations support to your research.

Response: We thank the reviewer for the comment, we have added more detail on the object detection algorithms layer, more reference (ref 24) and mathematical expressions/equations in the Object detection subsection of the Materials and Methods section.

Line 181: Faster R-CNN is the very early object detection proposed to tackle both the localization and classification problems in a single deep learning network so the visual kernel can be computed once for both problems in a single deep neural network forward operation, also known as end-to-end. The input image has passed to CNN network such as VGG network to get the internal latent tensor (intermediate layer) then sends the tensor to two separate subnetworks; first subnetwork performing bounding box location regression and also computing the classification in the second subnetwork. Where the loss function is defined as

L=(1)/Ncls ∑_i▒〖Lcls〗_i + λ(1)/Nreg ∑_i▒〖Lreg〗_i , where L is the total loss, i is the index of an anchor in a mini-batch, Ncls is the number of possible sub-image from sliding window, Lcls is log loss of classification, λ is a hyperparameter to balance the two loss functions, Nreg is the number of anchor locations and Lreg is a loss function for location regression computed from the robust loss function (smooth L1) [24].

Reference 24: Girshick R, editor Fast R-CNN. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV); 2015 7-13 Dec. 2015.

Line 196: Due to early success of Faster R-CNN in terms of high accuracy baseline, YOLO tackled another aspect of object deletion problem by dramatically increasing the frame-rate at 45 frames per second on a Titan X GPU (Nvidia Corporation, CA, USA). The intersection over union metric (IoU) is emphasized in this work to make the region proposal generation bounding box location more accurate by reframing object detection as a single regression problem, straight from image pixels to bounding box coordinates and class probabilities resulting in less computation and having high frame rate performance.

Line 206: Introduced a novel loss function by adding Focal Loss function to original cross entropy to improve accuracy of dense object detectors. Furthermore the RetinaNet architecture adopts Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), which is based on top-down pathway to allow the top level feature to laterally connect to the feature extraction of each layer leading to multi scale feature extraction capability therefore the RetinaNet able to detect smallest and biggest objects effectively.

Line 215: The CentetNet revisited the two stage object detection model, where the first stage is to compute the probability of an object in the observation image also called object likelihood to get the bounding box and the second step is to classify the object. The major difference of the CenterNet2 is applying object likelihood and conditional probability to classification P(〖C〗_k)=P(〖C〗_k|〖O〗_k)P(〖O〗_k), where k is index of detection bounding box P(〖O〗_k) is first-stage object likelihood, P(〖C〗_k|〖O〗_k) is conditional probability the given object be the class 〖C〗_k and P(〖C〗_k) is the probability of bounding box k be the class 〖C〗_k.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Ayan Seal, Editor

AI-based analysis of oral lesions using novel deep convolutional neural networks for early detection of oral cancer

PONE-D-22-06226R1

Dear Dr. Warin,

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.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

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,

Ayan Seal, 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 #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 #2: Yes

**********

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

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 #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 #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 #2: (No Response)

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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 #2: Yes: Rajashekhargouda C. Patil

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Ayan Seal, Editor

PONE-D-22-06226R1

AI-based analysis of oral lesions using novel deep convolutional neural networks for early detection of oral cancer

Dear Dr. Warin:

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.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

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

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Ayan Seal

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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