Development of the advised protocol for OCT study terminology and elements anterior segment OCT extension reporting guidelines (APOSTEL-AS): Study protocol

Ameenat Lola Solebo; Marcus Ang; Alice Bellchambers; Colin J. Chu; Alastair K. Denniston; Laura E. Downie; Thomas Evans; Alexander S. Fraser; Scott Hau; Alex S. Huang; Pearse A. Keane; Xiaoxuan Liu; Jodhbir S. Mehta; Giovanni Ometto; Axel Petzold; Edmund Tsui; Tamara S. Fraser; Benjamin Xu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0331272

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 10, 2024
30 Jun 2025 Decision Letter - Kumar Saurabh, Editor Dear Dr. Solebo, 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 reviewers comments are mostly favorable. However there are minor modifications which are required. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 14 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. A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). 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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, Kumar Saurabh 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. Please expand the acronym “NIHR” (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. 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. 4. Please provide a complete Data Availability Statement in the submission form, ensuring you include all necessary access information or a reason for why you are unable to make your data freely accessible. If your research concerns only data provided within your submission, please write "All data are in the manuscript and/or supporting information files" as your Data Availability Statement. 5. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests/Financial Disclosure section: I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Dr Keane has acted as a consultant for Retina Consultants of America, Topcon, Roche, Boehringer-Ingleheim, and Bitfount and is an equity owner in Big Picture Medical. He has received speaker fees from Zeiss, Novartis, Gyroscope, Boehringer-Ingleheim, Apellis, Roche, Abbvie, Topcon, and Hakim Group. He has received travel support from Bayer, Topcon, and Roche. He has attended advisory boards for Topcon, Bayer, Boehringer-Ingleheim, RetinAI, and Novartis. No other author has competing interests. We note that one or more of the authors have an affiliation to the commercial funders of this research study : Retina Consultants of America, Topcon, Roche, Boehringer-Ingleheim, Bitfount a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form. Please also include the following statement within your amended Funding Statement. “The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.” If your commercial affiliation did play a role in your study, please state and explain this role within your updated Funding Statement. b. Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc. Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If this adherence statement is not accurate and there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. Please include both an updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 6. 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 Authors The reviewers comments are mostly favorable. However there are minor modifications which are required. I invite you to address the concerns mentioned in reviewers comments Thank you [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? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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 Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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. Reviewer #1: Congratulations on attempting this important project that will help define - and standardize - terminology and elements in anterior segment OCT imaging. Some suggestions that may be helpful for authors... The "snowball extension" concept will be critically important to include 'persons of interest' who who have expertise but may not have published in past 4 years - especially because the research output has been lower due to worldwide pandemic. Furthermore, it is important to contact and attempt re-contact the corresponding authors as suggested in your study because things can get "lost' in the email deluge that we all are accustomed to. Consensus opinions will have greater acceptance and adoption with inclusivity of all the expert players. Reviewer #2: 1.What is the motivation for this publication? This is the study protocol and one would normally want to publish the results of the study rather than the study protocol. 2.The methodology looks very appropriate for the main objective of the study but correct the highlighted errors as indicated in the attached copy of the manuscript. ****** what does this mean? ). 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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 Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: PONE-D-24-47643 APOSTEL-AS.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331272.r001
Revision 1
12 Aug 2025 Author Response 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 Author response: We have followed the provided file naming guidance for figures and supplemental data, and ensured our manuscript formatting with the PLOS ONE template provided 2. Please expand the acronym “NIHR” (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Author response: This has been done 3. 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. Author response: We have ensured that grant references are labelled as such (as one of the reference numbers in this statement relates to the funding organisation, the Rubin Foundation, rather than a specific grant) 4. Please provide a complete Data Availability Statement in the submission form, ensuring you include all necessary access information or a reason for why you are unable to make your data freely accessible. If your research concerns only data provided within your submission, please write "All data are in the manuscript and/or supporting information files" as your Data Availability Statement. Author response: This has been done - we have stated that "All data are in the manuscript and/or supporting information files". 5. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests/Financial Disclosure section: I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Dr Keane has acted as a consultant for Retina Consultants of America, Topcon, Roche, Boehringer-Ingleheim, and Bitfount and is an equity owner in Big Picture Medical. He has received speaker fees from Zeiss, Novartis, Gyroscope, Boehringer-Ingleheim, Apellis, Roche, Abbvie, Topcon, and Hakim Group. He has received travel support from Bayer, Topcon, and Roche. He has attended advisory boards for Topcon, Bayer, Boehringer-Ingleheim, RetinAI, and Novartis. No other author has competing interests. We note that one or more of the authors have an affiliation to the commercial funders of this research study : Retina Consultants of America, Topcon, Roche, Boehringer-Ingleheim, Bitfount Author response: This study has not been funded by any commercial organisations – we have now separated the funder details from the competing interests details to make this clear. a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form. Please also include the following statement within your amended Funding Statement. “The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.” If your commercial affiliation did play a role in your study, please state and explain this role within your updated Funding Statement. Author response: We have ensured that it is clear that there was no commercial funding for the study, and that the non-commercial funders had no role in the study b. Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc. Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If this adherence statement is not accurate and there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. Please include both an updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. Author response: we have now separated the funder details from the competing interests details 6. 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. Author response: We confirm that the reference list is complete and correct Reviewer #1: The "snowball extension" concept will be critically important to include 'persons of interest' who have expertise but may not have published in past 4 years - especially because the research output has been lower due to worldwide pandemic. Furthermore, it is important to contact and attempt re-contact the corresponding authors as suggested in your study because things can get "lost' in the email deluge that we all are accustomed to. Consensus opinions will have greater acceptance and adoption with inclusivity of all the expert players. Author response: We thank the reviewer for their support for our methods (use of snowball recruitment as described in line 152, use of reminder emails as described in line 149, and the consensus approach). We note that no change has been suggested Reviewer #2: 1.What is the motivation for this publication? This is the study protocol and one would normally want to publish the results of the study rather than the study protocol. Author response: We thank the reviewer for asking us to explicitly state that the purpose of publishing the protocol is / was* to take an ‘Open Science’ approach to support and to support engagement for our activities across the stakeholder community of researchers and clinicians. (We have amended timelines within the article as the protocol was originally submitted some time ago.) 2.The methodology looks very appropriate for the main objective of the study but correct the highlighted errors as indicated in the attached copy of the manuscript. Line 114 This should be 'quantitative' Author response: This has been amended, thank you Line 134 Elaborate this a little bit more. A busy reader may not have the time to refer to the supplemental document. Author response: More details have now been provided Line 136, “Specific considerations for Screening, selection AS-OCT”: This doesn't sound meaningful. Can you rephrase it? Author response: Changed to “Specific considerations for acquisition, selection, processing and analyses of AS-OCT will be identified from these studies”, thank you for noting this error Line 157 this should be 'numerator' Author response: This has been amended, thank you Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: PLOS_APOSTEL_REVIEWERS_PROTOCOL .docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331272.r002
14 Aug 2025 Decision Letter - Kumar Saurabh, Editor Development of the Advised Protocol for OCT Study Terminology and Elements Anterior Segment OCT extension reporting guidelines (APOSTEL-AS): Study protocol PONE-D-24-47643R1 Dear Dr. Solebo, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support . 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, Kumar Saurabh Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331272.r003
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Kumar Saurabh, Editor PONE-D-24-47643R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Solebo, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset You will receive further instructions from the production team, including instructions on how to review your proof when it is ready. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few days to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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. You will receive an invoice from PLOS for your publication fee after your manuscript has reached the completed accept phase. If you receive an email requesting payment before acceptance or for any other service, this may be a phishing scheme. Learn how to identify phishing emails and protect your accounts at https://explore.plos.org/phishing. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@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. Kumar Saurabh Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331272.r004

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