PONE-D-22-13724Automatic multi-anatomical skull structure segmentation of cone-beam computed tomography scans using 3D UNETRPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Gillot,

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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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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 have read the manuscript “Automatic multi-anatomical skull structure segmentation of

cone-beam computed tomography scans using 3D UNETR”. I have following comments.

1. The literature suvery is poor and the relevent algorithms are required to be cited in the paper.

2. The introduction of the proposed coarse-to-fine framework is simple, especially about the patch-based semantic segmentation. As the main method of this paper, it would be better to give a more detail explanation about the coarse-to-fine framework and patch-based semantic segmentation.

3. The results from the relevent algorithms (of airway segmentation) are required to be compared with the prposed method results.

4. U-Net Architecture was used in the manuscript. However, authors didn't disclose the details of the deep learning architecture.

5. No result was shown for the comparison of manual and authomatic segmentation which was claimed through the title. The results are required which can show the error/difference between the manual volume assessment and automatic volume assessment.

6. Again Literature is incomplete. There are many more articles on CBCT based volumetric segmentation and written much elaborately. Should have had a proper comparative table on literature and flow chart giving the flow of data analysis.

7. Results are not discussed with any available literature. There lacks of conclusions and analysis of the experimental results in the results section. It would be more convincible if the authors can give additional technical analysis about their experimental results.

Reviewer #2: 1.Introduction section needs to be re-written to improve its quality and readability.

2.What is the motivation of the proposed work? Research gaps, objectives of the proposed work should be clearly justified

3.Overall, the basic background is not introduced well, where the notations are not illustrated much clear.

4.The literature has to be strongly updated with some relevant and recent papers focused on the fields dealt with in the manuscript.

5.The study lacks a theoretical framework which is important for the reader to grasp the crust of the research.

6. Explain why the current method was selected for the study, its importance and compare with traditional methods.

7.Authors are suggested to include more discussion on the results and also include some explanation regarding the justification to support why the proposed method is better in comparison towards other methods

8.Does this kind of study have never attempted before? Justify this statement and give an appropriate explanation to do so in this paper.

9.Quality of figures is so important too. Please provide some high-resolution figures. Some figures have a poor resolution.

10.The language usage throughout this paper need to be improved, the author should do some proofreading on it.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Automatic multi-anatomical skull structure segmentation of cone-beam computed tomography scans using 3D UNETR

PONE-D-22-13724R1

Dear Dr. Gillot,

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,

Sathishkumar V E

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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: The relevant changes were made. Thus the paper is improved. The paper can be accepted as an original contribution.

Reviewer #2: 1.Identified research gaps and contribution of the proposed study should be elaborated.

2.The Limitations of the proposed study need to be discussed before conclusion.

3.What assumptions authors made during the simulation phase of this research work? Provide a critique on this aspect.

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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

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