PONE-D-24-26492

Neuroimaging Findings and Balance Problems after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review Protocol

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Boscarello,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected.

Specifically:

The reviewers have noted that the current version of the paper lacks sufficient data to support the findings. Please ensure that the objectives of your study are thoroughly addressed and make every effort to respond to the reviewers' comments in your next effort.

I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision.

Kind regards,

Jose Gerardo Tamez-Peña, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors present a protocol to perform a meta-analysis study regarding neuroimaging findings that correlate with loss or deficit in balance within people that suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. Neuroimaging modalities to be included are structural MRI, metrics from diffusion tensor imaging and functional connectivity assessed using functional MRI. In addition, they will include results from EEG and MEG.

The protocol aims at finding correlations between neuroimaging metrics and loss in balance of patients that suffered a mild traumatic brain injuries. It establishes a good inclusion and exclusion criteria as well as data analysis methodology. I believe it may yield successful results, however, there are a few observations:

- Authors do not mention how will variability of MRI acquisition parameters will be handled. This is, MR system vendor, pulse sequences, magnetic field strength, dwi parameters such as number of diffusion directions, voxel size, preprocessing pipeline as well as fmri acquisition parameters. I believe it is important that authors include an strategy to deal with such variability sources. In MRI literature, such parameters are related as sources of variability and may lead to confounding results.

- It is not entirely clear whether the authors will analyze results reported directly in the publications or if they will request for the raw data and re-analyze it.

Reviewer #2: This manuscript has no data, only a description of a proposed study. The reasons for submitting such a study are unclear.

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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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[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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For journal use only: PONEDEC3

PONE-D-24-26492R1Neuroimaging Findings and Balance Problems after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review ProtocolPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Boscarello,

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 submit your revised manuscript by Jan 12 2025 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,

Maryam Bemanalizadeh

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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

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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. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

Reviewer #5: Yes

**********

2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

Reviewer #5: Yes

**********

3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

Reviewer #5: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

Reviewer #5: No

**********

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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

Reviewer #5: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #3: A study protocol is an important document that specifies the research plan and should be written in detail. I think the researchers fully describe the research question and justify the need for the study.

Reviewer #4: Dear Authors, thank you for your contribution.

I would like to know the purpose of publishing a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis protocol without having done it.

Reviewer #5: The protocol is sound. The only obvious issue is that there is no statement identifying where the data for the study will be made available. This wouldn't be an issue until publication of the article if the protocol were not being independently published first. In that case, question 4 above (Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?) must be answered no. Adding this statement should be very easy.

I do have clinical questions about their methodology, such as the decision to limit analysis to mild TBI, but that should not hinder the progress of their protocol. Beyond that, the study protocol largely meets the expectations of the journal and should be allowed to proceed.

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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 #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

Reviewer #5: 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.]

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Neuroimaging Findings and Balance Problems after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review Protocol

PONE-D-24-26492R2

Dear Dr. Boscarello,

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.

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Kind regards,

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: