PONE-D-25-02642An Optimized Transformer Model for Efficient Detection of Thoracic Diseases in Chest X-rays with Multi-Scale Feature FusionPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhou,

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Asadullah Shaikh, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: 1. In the abstract, the authors should mention how much improvement the proposed model achieved compared to existing methods.

2. At the end of the introduction section, the authors should mention the main contributions of the proposed model in points.

3. In the related work, the authors need to cite all the text with a supporting article properly.

4. The authors need to provide all the parameters used for model training in the form of a table.

5. The authors need to compare the results of the proposed model with the existing state-of-the-art model to validate its effectiveness.

6. The authors need to cite the recent deep learning-based predictors such as pACP-HybDeep, TargetCLP, DeepAIPs-Pred, and AIPs-DeepEnC-GA to provide an updated overview to the readers

7. How the authors evaluate the overfitting of the proposed model.

8. What should be the future directions of the proposed study?

Reviewer #2: 1. Check for grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors.

2. Use more significant keywords.

3. Write the result clearly in the abstract.

4. There are too many paragraphs in the introduction. Maximum 5-6 paragraphs are good.

5. Write the novelty/contribution of this work clearly in the introduction section.

6. Use a summary table for previous works in the related works.

7. Cite the below publications in the paper:

>> https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imu.2021.100741

>> https://doi.org/10.1109/IICAIET55139.2022.9936837

>> https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCNT56998.2023.10307223

8. Improve the figure quality.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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An Optimized Transformer Model for Efficient Detection of Thoracic Diseases in Chest X-rays with Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

PONE-D-25-02642R1

Dear Dr. Zhou,

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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Kind regards,

Asadullah Shaikh, Ph.D.

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: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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 required comments are successfully incorporated and paper is significantly improved. The paper can be accepted from my side

Reviewer #2: Thanks to the authors for addressing all comments and revising the manuscript. The quality of the manuscript has been improved.

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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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