The Potential Role of Artificial Intelligence in Lung Cancer Screening Using Low-Dose Computed Tomography
Mario Mascalchi
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Grenier et al reviewed the potential applications of Artificial Intelligence in lung cancer screening with low dose CT. In particular they assessed the role of AI in management of lung nodules and smoking-related diseases on LDCT scans in LCS.
Despite its essentially narrative structure, the paper is well written, comprehensive and timely.
Minor flaws
Some editing for typing errors is necessary (line 17, line 66, line 118, line 258, line 260, line 323, line 347).
Line 191. To label smoking related findings in subjects undergoing LCS as “incidental” findings reflects the american coarse lexicon. Actually, they should be more appropriately defined as “collateral” findings, given that they are certainly expected, leaving the term incidental to those findings which are unrelated to smoking history, e.g. thyroid cancer, timoma, etc.
It should be noted that in the Pinsky’s et al. recent study, emphysema was simply considered as present or absent by collecting the many radiologists reading of thousands LDCTs in NLST and that no quantification of emphysema was done. The study essentially provides a very rough estimation of the predicitive value of emphysema in LCS screenes, leaving room for more exhaustive quantitative assessment, likely supported by AI.
Author Response
Point1
Some editing for typing errors are necessary
Response
Line 17: a comma was added after "scans"
Line 66: ever-smokers was replaced by smokers
Line 118: the short trait (-) was deleted
Line 258: the strikethrough word "model" was deleted
Line 260: the strikethrough word "when" was deleted
Line: 323: "simultaneously" was replaced by "simultaneous"
Line 347: ?
Point 2
Line 19: to label smoking related findings in subjects undergoing LCS as "incidental findings" reflects american coarse lexicon. Actually, they should be more appropriately defined as "collateral findings"....
Response
"incidental" was replaced by "collateral"
Point 3
It should be noted that in the Pinsky's et al. recent study, emphysema was simply considered as absent or present by collecting the many radiologists reading of thousands LDCTs in NLST and that no quantification of emphysema was done......
Response
The sentence "Hence, Pinsky et al. who evaluated in the NLST data the association between incidental respiratory findings on LDCT scans with increased respiratory disease mortality, found emphysema on LDCT images was associated with a significant increase in respiratory disease mortality hazard ratio......" was deleted
Reviewer 2 Report
Please find my comments on the attached file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
