PONE-D-23-42003An image quality assessment index based on image features and keypoints for X-ray CT imagesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Maruyama,

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.

The review report requires substantial revisions to improve clarity and coherence. In the introduction, it is necessary to clearly present the aim/objective and hypothesis before detailing the methods, while eliminating redundant sections such as the outline. The methods section lacks a description of the statistical analysis employed. Moving to the discussion, there is a need to explore the method's applicability in patient settings, considering variations in normal anatomy, and addressing how parameters like kVp-settings and collimation might affect results. Additionally, the discussion should clarify how the method's results correlate with image quality across different clinical questions and highlight its advantages over existing standard methods. Overall, the report would benefit from thorough language editing to rectify numerous typos and grammatical errors, enhancing its readability and comprehension.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 15 2024 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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Yan Chai Hum

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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3. We note that your Data Availability Statement is currently as follows: [All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.]

Please confirm at this time whether or not your submission contains all raw data required to replicate the results of your study. Authors must share the “minimal data set” for their submission. PLOS defines the minimal data set to consist of the data required to replicate all study findings reported in the article, as well as related metadata and methods (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-minimal-data-set-definition).

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- The values used to build graphs;

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Additional Editor Comments:

Please revise according to reviewer's comments.

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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

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

Reviewer #1: 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

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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

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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: Introduction:

- There is a need to present a clear aim/objective and the hypothesis before stating the methods.

- Lines 52-63, is this method description?

- Lines 64-66 are hard to follow. Is this a conclusion?

- The outline in lines 66-69 is not needed

Methods:

- Statistical analysis description is missing.

Discussion:

- There is a need to discuss the use in patients and how differences in normal anatomy might affect the use of this method.

- Could different kVp-settings, collimation, slice thickness, pitch, etc., have changed the results?

- Diagnostic image quality is dependent on the clinical question. How are the results of these tests an index for image quality in different clinical questions? Are there some clinical questions where it is more useful than others?

- What does this method add to image quality assessment compared to today's standard methods?

General:

- The text is hard to follow, and there are some typos and grammatical errors. Thus, there is a need for language editing.

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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: Yes: Elin Kjelle

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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.

PONE-D-23-42003R1Image quality assessment index based on image features and keypoints for X-ray CT imagesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Maruyama,

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.

Please revise according to reviewer's comments. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 03 2024 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Yan Chai Hum

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

Please revise according to reviewers' comment.

[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.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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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

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: No

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Explain how the present manuscript differs from and improves upon these established previous works. Include a study with your survey papers and be sure to highlight any knowledge gaps that have come up recently.

Discuss some major sections in the article like the real time/ practical application of the paper, future perspectives, major contribution in the paper, significance of this study.

In the introduction section, include some other research applications on medical imaging as literature. Some suggestions are: Multi-modal medical image fusion framework using co-occurrence filter and local extrema in NSST domain; An end-to-end content-aware generative adversarial network based method for multimodal medical image fusion; TSJNet: A Multi-modality Target and Semantic Awareness Joint-driven Image Fusion Network; Clustering based Multi-modality Medical Image Fusion; Directive clustering contrast-based multi-modality medical image fusion for smart healthcare system

The authors should test their model with their dataset (not only from the public dataset). The complexity comparison should be made. Cross-Validation is lacking in this paper.

For the validation and best performance of result, use graphical analysis like histogram or intensity profile analysis.

Rewrite conclusion. Add concluding, contribution points in it briefly. Abstract needs to rewritten with better summary of paper.

Reviewer #3: This paper presents a simple quality assessment index for CT images. The Hamming distance between the features extracted by the feature extraction algorithm and the corresponding feature points of the reference image is used as the quality assessment result for the image. However, the manuscript is rather confusing in its structural arrangement, the logical expression is not very clear, and it also has the following problems that need to be revised:

The introduction does not make clear what the application context requires of the method. The reason why evaluation indicators such as SSIM cannot be used and new indicators need to be proposed is not well reflected in the introduction.

The design of the experimental section is problematic. The comparison of algorithms in the experimental section does not reflect well the superiority of the proposed quality evaluation method. At the same time, the algorithm lacks data on time complexity.

Insufficient arguments for the conclusions drawn from the experimental results. The conclusion in line 254 that the scores obtained by the algorithmic metrics proposed after the images have undergone affine transformations are not sufficiently correlated with SSIM to indicate that the algorithms are robust is not very convincing. Consideration could be given to validating this point based on the correlation between the results of the algorithm after the affine transformation and the results of algorithms such as CW-SSIM and the like (correlation algorithms that can still efficiently detect unstructured distortions).

There is a lack of explanation about the reason for choosing the feature extraction algorithm. Whether the specific characteristics of CT images were taken into account or whether there were other considerations.

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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

Reviewer #3: No

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[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.

Image quality assessment index based on image features and keypoints for X-ray CT images

PONE-D-23-42003R2

Dear Dr. Maruyama,

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,

Yan Chai Hum

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: