Broad-spectrum infrared thermography for detection of M2 digital dermatitis lesions on hind feet of standing dairy cattle

Arne Vanhoudt; Casey Jacobs; Maaike Caron; Herman W. Barkema; Mirjam Nielen; Tine van Werven; Karin Orsel

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280098

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 29, 2022
19 Jul 2022 Decision Letter - Julio Cesar de Souza, Editor PONE-D-22-12645Broad-spectrum infrared thermography for detection of M2 digital dermatitis lesions on hind feet of standing dairy cattlePLOS ONE Dear Dr. Vanhoudt, 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. ============================== Dear Sir, Please attend to the reviewer's suggestions to go ahead with the procedures. Best regards,============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 02 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “This study was funded by CAAP (Canadian Agriculture Adaptation Program; Canada), Alberta Milk (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), and DeLaval Manufacturing (Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America). Additional thanks to Kelsey Gray and Gwen Roy (University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) for assistance with data collection. Special thank you to Al Schaefer and Pierre Lepage (Lacombe Research and Development Centre, Alberta, Canada) for assistance and guidance regarding the use of IRT cameras and for allowing the use of the FLiR i3 camera. The authors are also grateful for the advice of Hans Vernooij (Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands) on the statistical analyses and the help of Lisanne van der Voort (Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands) for preparing the figures.” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “This study was funded by CAAP (Canadian Agriculture Adaptation Program; Canada; http://omaf.gov.on.ca/english/food/industry/can-agri-adapt.htm), Alberta Milk (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; https://albertamilk.com/), and DeLaval Manufacturing (Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America; https://www.delaval.com/en-us/) The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. 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: Dear Sir, please attend to the reviewer's suggestions to go ahead with the procedures. Best regards, [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. 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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: Introduction: readable, comprehensive, and covering the subject quite right. The first paragraph in the introduction should be based on a reference. Results: good and clear. The titles of the tables in the results (Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4) are too long. I suggest that they be abbreviated. Discussion: The results needs more discussion. The authors should mention the reasons for the results in detail. Figure 1, 2 and 3 are not clear and need more accuracy. Reviewer #2: With interest I read your paper. The paper provides relevant data regarding using IRT to detect M2 lesions in dairy cattle. Well written! Below you find my minor comments 53-55: add appropriate reference(s) and the same for lines 57-58. 95: have you investigates the difference between ulcerative and proliferative M2 lesions (according to ICAR guidelines in cattle). I expected some differences. 125-126: warm/cold water source? 137: see please my previous comment (ulcerative/ proliferative M2?) Have you measure the room temperature/humidity. This would higly influce your results as you measure the absolute values of IRTmax rather than the difference. Are all measurement done within optimal condition? When you applied the IRT-Imaging after the washing? Directly or in due of time? 207: observation done as well for fore limbs? Please add details to claw trimming performed on farms. Any anamnestic data are available and already treatment procedures of DD on farms. Effect of other foot lesions? Either skin or horn lesion must be reported. How other lesions may affect your outcome? ****** 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: Yes: Prof. Dr. Khalid Chillab Kridie Al-Salhie Reviewer #2: No ******** [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.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280098.r001
Revision 1
7 Dec 2022 Author Response PONE-D-22-12645 Broad-spectrum infrared thermography for detection of M2 digital dermatitis lesions on hind feet of standing dairy cattle ============================== 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. AU: Apologies, we checked the templates and hope we now meet the PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. In your Methods section, please provide additional details regarding participant consent from the owners of the animals. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal). If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. AU: We obtained written informed consent from the farmers who participated in this study (L108). 3. PLOS journals require authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction unless the data are subject to ethical restrictions or owned by someone other than the authors (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-acceptable-data-access-restrictions). Therefore, we ask that you please upload underlying data to an appropriate data repository and update your Data Availability Statement accordingly or provide all contact details for where an interested researcher would need to apply to gain access to the relevant data. Please note that it is not acceptable for an author to be the sole named individual responsible for ensuring data access. AU: Due to a signed agreement between the researchers and farmers we are unable to make all data underlying the findings of this manuscript fully available without restriction. Access to the anonymised dataset for research involving the research group that collected the original data is possible, and enquiries for this purpose can be made by contacting the corresponding author or research group (headpah@ucalgary.ca or karin.orsel@ucalgary.ca). 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “This study was funded by CAAP (Canadian Agriculture Adaptation Program; Canada), Alberta Milk (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), and DeLaval Manufacturing (Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America). Additional thanks to Kelsey Gray and Gwen Roy (University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) for assistance with data collection. Special thank you to Al Schaefer and Pierre Lepage (Lacombe Research and Development Centre, Alberta, Canada) for assistance and guidance regarding the use of IRT cameras and for allowing the use of the FLiR i3 camera. The authors are also grateful for the advice of Hans Vernooij (Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands) on the statistical analyses and the help of Lisanne van der Voort (Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands) for preparing the figures.” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “This study was funded by CAAP (Canadian Agriculture Adaptation Program; Canada; http://omaf.gov.on.ca/english/food/industry/can-agri-adapt.htm), Alberta Milk (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; https://albertamilk.com/), and DeLaval Manufacturing (Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America; https://www.delaval.com/en-us/) The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. AU: Thank you for this guidance. We deleted funding related statements from the Acknowledgements section and provided an amended funding statement in the cover letter. 5. 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. AU: We have checked all the references cited in this manuscript and made no changes. Additional Editor Comments: Dear Sir, please attend to the reviewer's suggestions to go ahead with the procedures. Best regards, [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: I Don't Know ________________________________________ 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: AU: Thank you for your time and effort reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate your feedback and have done our best to address your comments as good as possible. Line numbers refer to those in the revised manuscript. Introduction: readable, comprehensive, and covering the subject quite right. The first paragraph in the introduction should be based on a reference. AU: We have added references to the first paragraph of the introduction (L56 and 58) . Results: good and clear. The titles of the tables in the results (Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4) are too long. I suggest that they be abbreviated. AU: Thanks. We have condensed the titles of the tables a much as possible while adhering to our goal to make the tables interpretable without the manuscript. Discussion: The results needs more discussion. The authors should mention the reasons for the results in detail. AU: Can you please provide more specific guidance on what you exactly mean with your request for more discussion? Currently the discussion includes a summary of the key findings of the study and how these relate to previous work, an outlook for future potential of IRT in DD and foot health control and limitations of the study. Figure 1, 2 and 3 are not clear and need more accuracy. AU: We uploaded figure files with higher accuracy. Reviewer #2: AU: Thank you for your time and effort reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate your feedback and have done our best to address your comments as good as possible. Line numbers refer to those in the revised manuscript. With interest I read your paper. The paper provides relevant data regarding using IRT to detect M2 lesions in dairy cattle. Well written! Below you find my minor comments 53-55: add appropriate reference(s) and the same for lines 57-58. AU: We added references for these statements (L56 and 58) 95: have you investigates the difference between ulcerative and proliferative M2 lesions (according to ICAR guidelines in cattle). I expected some differences. AU: Thank you for this interesting hypothesis. In this study we did not differentiate between ulcerative and proliferative lesions. The data for this study was collected before ulcerative proliferative was included in ICAR guideline. Retrospectively we recall most M2 lesions were ulcerative, but this level of detail was not recorded. 125-126: warm/cold water source? AU: Water temperature was not recorded. We used a water source as was available in the parlour. L132 137: see please my previous comment (ulcerative/ proliferative M2?) AU: The data for this study was collected before ulcerative proliferative was included in ICAR guideline. Have you measured the room temperature/humidity. This would highly influence your results as you measure the absolute values of IRTmax rather than the difference. AU: The IRT camera was calibrated at the start of each visit (L168-171). Are all measurement done within optimal condition? AU: With our study we aimed to investigate the on farm application of IRT for the detection of M2 lesions (L95-97), hence conditions were not always optimal but realistic. When you applied the IRT-Imaging after the washing? Directly or in due of time? AU: Thank you for pointing out that this is not clear. We moved the sentence on the timing of the IRT images of washed feet to L133-135 and added additional information. We hope this is clear now. “For the IRT images of washed feet, the amount of time between washing feet and capturing the second IRT image varied according to the milking routine and size of the milking parlour.” 207: observation done as well for fore limbs? AU: We only studied hind feet (L96, 129 and 156) Please add details to claw trimming performed on farms. Any anamnestic data are available and already treatment procedures of DD on farms. AU: Details on the claw trimming protocols on the farms were not available. All farms continued their regular treatment and hoof trimming schedule during the entire study duration. The farms participated in a footbathing study (Jacobs et al. 2017). Information added on L120-124. Effect of other foot lesions? Either skin or horn lesion must be reported. How other lesions may affect your outcome? AU: For the primary aim of this study , i.e. determine whether broad spectrum IRT from unwashed hind feet of cows standing in a milking parlour was associated with M2 lesions, we needed to test the IRT performance without prior information on presence or absence of other lesions. We discuss the effect of other lesions on IRT recordings and our results on L320-324. ________________________________________ 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: Yes: Prof. Dr. Khalid Chillab Kridie Al-Salhie Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280098.r002
20 Dec 2022 Decision Letter - Julio Cesar de Souza, Editor Broad-spectrum infrared thermography for detection of M2 digital dermatitis lesions on hind feet of standing dairy cattle PONE-D-22-12645R1 Dear Dr. Vanhoudt, 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, Julio Cesar de Souza, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Accept Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280098.r003
Formally Accepted
4 Jan 2023 Acceptance Letter - Julio Cesar de Souza, Editor PONE-D-22-12645R1 Broad-spectrum infrared thermography for detection of M2 digital dermatitis lesions on hind feet of standing dairy cattle Dear Dr. Vanhoudt: 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. Julio Cesar de Souza Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280098.r004

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