The Case History of an Insect Infestation Revealed Using X-ray Computed Tomography and Implications for Museum Collections Management Decisions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,
I can see you put some diligence into writing and presenting your work, and I respect that. However, I would strongly advise you to review the full text with a native English speaker, as there are simply too many mistakes for me to go through in the introduction alone.

Abstract has to be rewritten.

Introduction must be improved with a more detailed references list. Several studies are focused on xylophagous insects attact detected by CT. 

Materials paragraph is missing.

Methods are not clear and CT instrument operation is not explained. Please use technical language. I can not accept cubic pixel to inted voxel.

Results and conclusion paragraph must be incorporated.

Write more synthetic conclusion section.

Comments and corrections are listed in the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your time and sharing your expertise. Our detailed responses to the comments are highlighted below in red. We believe the constructive comments resulted in a much-improved submission and we again thank you for your encouragement and assistance.

"Please see the attachment." 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments:

Museum collections are vulnerable to diverse pests such as insects. Over extended period, the cumulative effects of such pests can totally destroy an object. Wood pests belong to those classified as the most destructive ones. Wood-boring beetles and dry-wood termites are known to commonly cause great damages among the wood pests. Constant monitoring of wood-infesting pests is, thus, essential for safeguarding the objects in the museum collections. The development, adaptation and application of non-destructive methods that can be used for such diagnostic purposes are very valuable. In this respect, the case study presented in this contribution, portraying the application of CT for the detection of insect infestation and its relevance for management decision, is interesting and important. Non-destructive techniques for monitoring and investigation of pest investigation and damage are vital in view of respecting the physical integrity of unique objects in cultural heritage.

The main method used is CT aided by visual examinations. Closer examinations of the effects of the termite infestations with the help of microscope in a non-destructive manner could also provide useful information in a complementary manner. The CT method applied needs more description in terms of the experimental parameters selected.

Some of the texts in the conclusion (with the references included therein) appear to be more appropriate if they are used in the introduction and result (and discussion) parts.

 

Specific comments:

Line 13: estimation) – estimation

Line 64: termite fecal pellets – the red arrow indicates not that. The yellow arrow is not visible.

Line 71: Description of the measurement conditions: instrument voltage, current, exposure time, total scan time, etc.? Resolution achieved/voxel size? Figure 2 caption: …. 3D structure and volume estimation…. (‘generation’ can be deleted).

Line 79: Slice thickness? Slice spacing?

Line 81: … enhance contrast and facilitate ….

Line 86: Reference 11 quoted – how is this case from photogrammetry related to the segmentation addressed?

Line 89: Insect  Activity ….. RoI – were areas …..

Nails is any metal ……- were marked as ….. (check the sentences → re-writing may be necessary)

Line 119:  .. to increase. However, little …….

Line 120: … in works of art ( )

Line 128 … based on the …..

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your time and sharing your expertise. Our detailed responses to the comments are highlighted below in red. We believe the constructive comments resulted in a much-improved submission and we again thank you for your encouragement and assistance.

"Please see the attachment." 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is well written and describes an interesting application of X-ray Computed Tomography to Cultural Heritage artefacts. However, in my opinion, in order to be publishable, some minor revisions of the manuscript are necessary. In the following, my observations and suggestions.

Abstract

Line 4-7: It seems to be missing the main verb in the sentence

Introduction

Caption of Figure 1: a yellow arrow is mentioned in the caption, but it seems missing. Moreover, the red arrow is in a wrong position.

Methods

Caption of Figure 2: I think that the word "generating" is redundant

2.1 CT imaging

In my opinion it could be useful to insert additional information on the CT scan parameters (X-ray tube voltage, number of projections, number of pixels in each projection, number of pixels and pixel size in the reconstructed slices....)

2.2 Image processing

Line 89: I suggest to put : instead of -  after the word titles

The explanation of "Interior" is not visible

Insect activity: please check the sentence, as it is not clear

Nail: I think that the verb "is" should be deleted

Figure 3: Please explain the meaning of "other anomalies" in the caption

2.4 Volume estimation

Line 110-111: Instead of "cuboid pixel" I suggest to use "voxel". If the voxel is cubic and its side is 0.6 mm, the volume is not 0.6 mm³ . Please clarify this point.

Line 116: I suggest to put : instead of -  after the word below

Please check formula (2) and (3) as they seems wrong (probably the quantities in the second side of the equations should be swapped, otherwise the percentage volume of wood removed by insects would be higher than 100%)

In the sentence "r is pixelvolume from RoIs: Insect Assumptions," the words pixel and volume should be separated and the final comma should be replaced by a period.

Line 120: the reference Re et al. 2014 is mentioned in the text, but it is not present in the list of references

Table 1: I suggest substituting the word voxel for the word pixel

Please check the punctuation in the captions of the figures 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, as it doesn't seem correct to me.

Abbreviations

ROT should be substituted with ROI

I suggest to add the following papers to the list of references:

• B. BENTIVOGLIO-RAVASIO, D. DREOSSI, E. MARCONI, N. SODINI, L. MANCINI, C. TONINI, L. TROTTA, F. ZANINI, Synchrotron radiation microtomography of musical instruments: a non-destructive monitoring technique for insect infestations, . Ent. Acarol. Res., Ser. II, 43 (2): 149-155, 2011
• IWAMOTO J., KENMOCHI Y., KOTANI K., NAGASAWA I., Extraction of a 3D graph structure of wormholes in a wooden statue of Buddha by X-ray CT image analysis. Proceedings of the Fifth Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV2002: 864-870, 2002.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your time and sharing your expertise. Our detailed responses to the comments are highlighted below in red. We believe the constructive comments resulted in a much-improved submission and we again thank you for your encouragement and assistance.

"Please see the attachment." 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thanks for improving your submission.

Now I can definitely recommend it for publication. Good job.

The only advice is to check the text from lines 66 till 70 which is repeated in lines 79-84. Maybe I will remove it from there and leave it in the CT imaging paragraph only.

Kind Regards