Approach to standardized material characterization of the human lumbopelvic system—Specification, preparation and storage

Sascha Kurz; Marc Gebhardt; Fanny Grundmann; Christoph-Eckhard Heyde; Hanno Steinke

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289482

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 10, 2022
14 Apr 2023 Decision Letter - Malgorzata Wojcik, Editor PONE-D-22-30924Approach to Standardized Material Characterization of the Human Lumbopelvic System - Specification, Preparation and StoragePLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sascha Kurz, 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. 1. Lacks Bioethics Committee approval numbers. 2. Methodology -needs to be described in detail. 3. Results - structure the presentation of results, with subsections/subsections. 4. Discussion -needs to be developed. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 29 2023 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. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Malgorzata Wojcik, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 3. "Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “We acknowledge co-support from Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (grant numbers MG: ZIM 16KN051655, SK: ZIM 16KN051656), the Saxonian State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts (stipend reference MG: 31004 70 809) and support from Open Access Publishing Fund of Leipzig University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy-ZIM: https://www.zim.de/ZIM/Navigation/DE/Home/home.html Saxonian State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts - HTWK Leipzig - Förderlinie N-Promotion 2020: https://gradz.htwk-leipzig.de/ Open Access Publishing Fund of Leipzig University: https://www.ub.uni-leipzig.de/open-science/oa-allgemein/” Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “We acknowledge co-support from Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (grant numbers ZIM 16KN051655, ZIM 16KN051656), the Saxonian State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts (stipend reference 31004 70 809) and support from Open Access Publishing Fund of Leipzig University. The sponsors played no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the manuscript. Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Ing. Volker Slowik and Dr. Ing. Thomas Klink from the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences for their continuous support.” We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, 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: “We acknowledge co-support from Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (grant numbers MG: ZIM 16KN051655, SK: ZIM 16KN051656), the Saxonian State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts (stipend reference MG: 31004 70 809) and support from Open Access Publishing Fund of Leipzig University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy-ZIM: https://www.zim.de/ZIM/Navigation/DE/Home/home.html Saxonian State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts - HTWK Leipzig - Förderlinie N-Promotion 2020: https://gradz.htwk-leipzig.de/ Open Access Publishing Fund of Leipzig University: https://www.ub.uni-leipzig.de/open-science/oa-allgemein/” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Additional Editor Comments: Dear Dr Sascha Kurz, 1. Lacks Bioethics Committee approval numbers. 2. Methodology -needs to be described in detail. 3. Results - structure the presentation of results, with subsections/subsections. 4. Discussion -needs to be developed. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r001
Revision 1
3 May 2023 Author Response Journal requirements: 1. The changes have been made as requested and we hope the manuscript now meets your requirements. 2. The funding information was reviewed again and added to the cover letter as requested (page 2). Please let us know if we missed discrepancies. 3. The financial disclosure was reviewed again and added to the cover letter as requested (page 2). 4. All funding information was removed from the manuscript as requested and added to the cover letter (page 2). The acknowledgment section was therefore updated in the manuscript. Additional editor comments: 1. There are no bioethics committee approval numbers, since the Institute of Anatomy of Leipzig University has a general institutional approval for the use of postmortem tissues of human body donors as declared in the manuscripts at the beginning of the methods section under preparation acquisition (lines 82-89): “All tissues originated from the Institute of Anatomy of Leipzig University. While alive, all body donors gave their informed and written consent to the donation of their post-mortem tissues for education and research purposes. Being part of the body donor program regulated by the Saxonian Death and Funeral Act of 1994 (3rd section, paragraph 18, item 8), institutional approval for the use of the post-mortem tissues was obtained from the Institute of Anatomy, Leipzig University. The authors declare that all experiments were performed according to the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.” Accordingly, this has already been formulated in a variety of publications, for example: Hammer, Niels; Glätzner, Juliane; Feja, Christine; Kühne, Christian; Meixensberger, Jürgen; Planitzer, Uwe et al. (2015): Human vagus nerve branching in the cervical region. In: PloS one 10 (2), e0118006. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118006. The separate section “Ethics Decleration” has been removed according to the E-Mail from May 3, 2023. 2. More details were added in lines 126-127, 151-172, 185-187, 195-196, 202-209, 215-216, 250-260 and 269-274. 3. Changed as requested in lines 288 and 313. 4. Developed and changed as requested in lines 348-357 and 380-391. Reviewer's comments: No additional comments were received. PACE: Uploaded, converted and replaced as requested. Additional journal requirements: 1. Changed as requested in lines 128, 168, 180, 224, 241, 264, 301, 328 and 341. 2. Deleted as requested. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ASC-P1_1st_response_point-by-point_2023-05-03.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r002
17 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - JJ Cray Jr., Editor PONE-D-22-30924R1Approach to standardized material characterization of the human lumbopelvic system - specification, preparation and storagePLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kurz, 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. There is an additional request that the authors edit to add the specific anatomical landmarks for their cuts. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 31 2023 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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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. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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. 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Hence, it appears challenging to highly evaluate the academic value of these papers. Reviewer #2: The paper looks really good. The previous revisions have been completed. I am not a statistician so I did not comment on the stats however, they looked good to me. Only additional revision I have is to add specific anatomical landmarks for the boney pelvis cuts. Some of the specific landmarks were listed on page 16, lines 184-189, but it would be nice to know where all of the cuts were made. Especially since it was mentioned on page 16, line 177 that a "plane was drawn between each two landmarks". Finally I though figure 9 was awesome! ****** 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 ******** [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r003
Revision 2
18 Jul 2023 Author Response Response to Reviewers - Point-by-point The authors would like to thank for the important and beneficial comments, all of them were considered. The manuscript has been revised accordingly and our responses can be found below. Reviewer #1: To the authors The reviewer has over 18 years of research experience in biomechanical experiments using cadavers. I read the authors' paper with great interest. It is mentioned that the paper provides a detailed description of the aspects that all researchers in the current field are concerned about. However, these aspects are already well known to other researchers in the related field and are widely practiced and acknowledged. Hence, it appears challenging to highly evaluate the academic value of these papers. Answer to Reviewer #1: Thank you for your honest and direct assessment. We are aware that many scientists are familiar with the difficulties of working with cadavers and try to solve them to the best of their knowledge and belief. However, the respective ways are unfortunately often very different and make good work sometimes difficult to compare. Our effort was therefore to show a way as simple as possible to address these problems while still achieving comparable results. So that many can contribute with their research to a comparable data set. Reviewer #2: To the authors The paper looks really good. The previous revisions have been completed. I am not a statistician so I did not comment on the stats however, they looked good to me. Only additional revision I have is to add specific anatomical landmarks for the boney pelvis cuts. Some of the specific landmarks were listed on page 16, lines 184-189, but it would be nice to know where all of the cuts were made. Especially since it was mentioned on page 16, line 177 that a "plane was drawn between each two landmarks". Finally I though figure 9 was awesome! Answer to Reviewer #2: Thank you very much for your constructive comments and encouraging words, we really appreciate it. For a better description of the sectioning planes we adjusted lines 176, 181, 184 and 186-188. Also we improved Fig 3 and added Table 1 for a clearer and more detailed description of the sectioning planes without overloading the text. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ASC-P1_2nd_response_point-by-point_2023-07-18.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r004
20 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - JJ Cray Jr., Editor Approach to standardized material characterization of the human lumbopelvic system - specification, preparation and storage PONE-D-22-30924R2 Dear Dr. Kurz, 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, JJ Cray Jr., Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r005
Formally Accepted
25 Jul 2023 Acceptance Letter - JJ Cray Jr., Editor PONE-D-22-30924R2 Approach to standardized material characterization of the human lumbopelvic system - specification, preparation and storage Dear Dr. Kurz: 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. JJ Cray Jr. Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289482.r006

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