Veins Depth Estimation Using Diffused Reflectance Parameter
, Aamir Shahzad 2, Syed Ayaz Ali Shah 2, Muhammad Amir Khan 2, Tallha Akram 3 and WuYang Zhou 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Decision Letter of Article: Veins Depth Estimation Using Diffused Reflectance Parameter
This paper showed a study of the Intravenous (IV) catheterization process based on NIR spectroscopy. This methodology can be a suitable process for previous analysis and evaluation in medical facilities, Intensive unity in hospital facilities, etc.
The manuscript needs significant improvements:
1-The text and English must be improved.
2-The references must be revised. There some fails.
3-This method was implemented by the authors. Which is the comparison with other methods?
4-The authors performed a previous assay to compare with other methods. Is it validated?
5-How did the authors eliminate the noise signal that can mask the final results? The high pigmentation is a problem? Why not? A specific algorithm was developed for this data/analysis?
6-In line 186: the parameter indication must be uniformized.
7-Based on final errors, this method is it suitable to use in several skin color? The humidity and other parameters can negatively influence the performance of this method?
This work can be improved due to failures and doubts. For those reasons, I suggest to Editor a major revision.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Responses to Reviewer1
On behalf of all authors, I would like to extend gratitude to the reviewer for these valuable comments and suggestions for the technical improvement of our manuscript. We have done all the corrections which were pointed out by the reviewer. The pointwise detail of all corrections is given in the following.
1-The text and English must be improved.
We have tried our best to improve the writing and grammar of this manuscript. The revised manuscript is improved in terms of the English language.
2-The references must be revised. There some fails.
The references are revised according to the reference guide of MDPI journals given at https://www.mdpi.com/authors/references
3-This method was implemented by the authors. Which is the comparison with other methods?
We have compared our proposed method with two existing methods given in [13] by Izumi e.t al. and [16] by Izumi e.t al. The comparison is given in Table 2.
4-The authors performed a previous assay to compare with other methods. Is it validated?
We have noted down the results of previous methods from the literature as we could not implement these methods. The reason is that it is not possible to implement the whole experimental setup of these methods. But overall we have carefully considered that these methods w.r.t closed relevancy as they are implementing the NIR spectrum for the measurement of vessel depth.
5-How did the authors eliminate the noise signal that can mask the results? The high pigmentation is a problem? Why not? A specific algorithm was developed for this data/analysis?
The noise in calculating diffused reflectance could be due to ambient lighting. The sensitivity analysis given in section 5.1 is done in order to compensate for the error occurs due to noise. After this analysis, we concluded that the choice of optical parameters is important in accordance with the lighting conditions of actual experiments.
6-In line 186: the parameter indication must be uniformized.
The parameters are indicated properly in this revised manuscript.
7-Based on final errors, this method is it suitable to use in several skin colour? The humidity and other parameters can negatively influence the performance of this method?
This is a very good question related to the in-depth knowledge of this field. The method is suitable for every skin color as we are using the optimum illuminations in NIR range. Our study about optimum illumination is reported in [8]. The authors would like to acknowledge that we haven’t studied the change in parameters due to humidity. But as explained in comment 5, the sensitivity analysis shows that even the optical parameters changed about 5%, still this method reports less error as compared to the state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature.
Regards,
Dr. Rab Nawaz Jadoon
Assistant Professor
Department of CS, COMSATS University, Islamabad
Pakistan
&
Senior Research Fellow
SiST USTC Hefei, China
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
The main topic of your paper sounds good. Catheterization is a very important and popular life-saving medical treatment. Problem with blood vessels - their small size, deep under the skin, low mechanical durability are a big problem for medical personnel. Any method that allows improving the comfort of the work of medical personnel is welcome. But these methods need to be effective online!
The Monte Carlo method adopted by the authors seems to be appropriate. But the input data for the simulation seems to be incorrect since the simulation took 9h 55min.
- pleas describe the axes in Fig. 3
- "NIR imaging is considered the most suitable technique to visualize the location of subcutaneous veins during the IV catheterization process" - in aspects of 9h 55min "The total elapsed time for each simulation" seems to be an unconvincing tool
Author Response
Response to Reviewer2
On behalf of all authors, I would like to extend gratitude to the reviewer for these valuable comments and suggestions for the technical improvement of our manuscript. We have done the corrections which were pointed out by the reviewer.
- Please describe the axes in figure 3.
The axes of Figure3 are now explained in its caption. Thank you for pointing out this missing information.
- ..The total elapsed time for each simulation seems to be an unconvincing tool.
There must be some lacking on our part to properly explain the working of the proposed system. In this paper, we have proposed a mathematical model to measure the blood vessel’s depth using diffused reflectance parameter ‘Rd’. In real, this diffused reflectance will be calculated/obtained from the NIR image captured with the proposed setup shown in figure 1. For the validation of our model, we have used Monte Carlo simulations to calculate the diffused reflectance against the provided vessel depth. The time taken by these simulations was 9h 55m, but this is just for experimentation and validation process. The system will work online by capturing a NIR image and compute Rd from the image which will be used to estimate the depth of blood vessels by the proposed mathematical model.
Regards,
Dr. Rab Nawaz Jadoon
Assistant Professor
Department of CS, COMSATS University, Islamabad
Pakistan
&
Senior Research Fellow
SiST USTC Hefei, China
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
No commments.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
Thank you for revised version of your paper.
I'll be following your progress in this Topic.
Regards
