Global Sensitivity Analysis and Uncertainty Quantification for Simulated Atrial Electrocardiograms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

 

The presented paper deals with sensitivity analysis (SA) and uncertainty quantification (UQ) of synthetic atrial electrocardiogram data via polynomial chaos expansion (PCE). The paper is very well written. In addition, the paper provides a detailed description of the mathematical apparatus which could be very useful. Minor edits:

1.       You should shorten the title of the article. A good title should have approximately 8 words.

2.       Although Metrology journal has no limits on the length of an article, you should try to shorten certain parts of the article. In fact, your article is 25 pages in total, not including references, which is quite a lot for a research article.

3.       You should double check typos and grammatical errors.

4.       The used figures should be in vector quality to maintain their full quality. When describing axes, use round brackets instead of square brackets and start with a capital letter.

5.       Fig. 2, 5, 6, 7 and A1 here it would be appropriate to put the individual figures as subfigure with the label (a) to (d) for example. Adjust the caption of the figures accordingly (instead of "top", "bottom" etc. I would use (a), (b) etc. to refer them). I am also considering whether it is necessary to give Fig. A1 as an attachment and not put it directly as Fig. 8. So I suggest to change location and refer to it in the text.

6.       For figures, adjust the X-axis range so that they are not too large relative to the signal. E.g. Fig. 2 for the figures (c) and (d), the X-axis should be up to 12, where the signals themselves end.

7.       Fig 5a could have a better choice of signals colours to make it quicker to navigate.

8.       In the discussion, you should state the future intent and direction of the research.

9.       I recommend to replace some references with newer ones and from quality journals. I also recommend reducing the number of references that are self-citations. Two authors are self-cited in 8 references.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents a proposed method to analyze and to quantify the synthetic atrial electrocardiogram data via polynomial chaos expansion.

The topic of the paper is interesting. The analytical equations were well-presented and well-defined.

There are only 2 comments I provided for the submitted paper for the improved prior to publication:

1. Authors mentioned that the standard metrological approach f using Monte-Carlo simulations is computationally prohibitive, the Authors used a nonintrusive polynomial chaos-based approximation of the forward model. My question is: why the Monte-Carlo method is used as a comparable method? Are there other methods that can be compared to convince the reviewer that the proposed method is better?

I could not find the comparison method between the Monte-Carlo model with the proposed method in the Results Section.

2. Doing research in the Biomedical Signal Processing area needs validation with an expert. I suggest the Authors include one paragraph that is the opinion or analysis of the Cardiologist in the Discussion Section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for addressing the comments.

I have read the revised paper and the authors' response. I have no further comments, however, I suggest including the Authors response in the paper especially the answer to comment #2.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you for your helpful commentary. We slightly reworked "Conclusion" and Appendix B to further emphasise the points raised in our response.