Dose-Area Product Determination and Beam Monitor Calibration for the Fixed Beam of the Shanghai Advanced Proton Therapy Facility
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dose-area product determination and beam monitor calibration for Proton radiotherapy was presented in this paper. The Proton radiotherapy task is in progress and therefore dosimetry comparisons and calculations are very interesting. This paper presents the results of two dosimeters and calculations and gives a useful discussion.
I recommend elaborating on the proton energy range and the potential to obtain improvements in dose delivery.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
An interesting study and a solid piece of work, unfortunately let down my a poor presentation. The language is in dire need to improvement, both in grammar and punctuation. It should be written in third person passive. The figure captions are largely meaningless. They should justify the inclusion of the figure and described the main message of each figure. Labels in figures are too small and hardly readable, Often, abbreviations are used without being defined and left for the read to guess, or references are given well after a topic was mentioned first. On a technical side, Monte Carlo simulations were used to extract correction factors. It would be a strong improvement to the paper to show a validation and the precision of the code and results used.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
I think the manuscript would benefit from a clearer introduction and description of what is done and how. The language should also be improved. I have a really hard time following what is being done.A few extra paragraphs about what the overall goals and why it is important would also be useful to a broader audience.
Here are further comments
Introduction:
l.38-39: I don't understand this sentence. What is the difference between the proton scanning beam and the mono-energetic beam. Are they the same? Please describe the proton scanning beam you are referring to.
l.40: provide citation for TRS398l.43: "dose of single spot": what does this mean?
l.46-47: "...do not provide the calibration factor in terms of ....". Please explain what calibration factor you are referring to. Is there any reason this calibration factor is not provided (maybe it is difficult to estimate? data is missing?)
l.48: "reference conditions": what are those?
l.54: "the uniformity is must when analyzing..." I don't understand this sentenceParagraph starting in line 56: "uniform field with spot spacing..." Please provide more details, I don't understand what is the goal here.
2.Materials and methods
2.1. Maybe a schematic would help here. What are scanning magnets U and V?
2.2: PTW acronym is not defined
"a uniform 10x10 square field": uniform in what way?
2.3 l118: "we employed log file-based reconstruction" This needs to be described. What is provided by the log files and how is the reconstruction done? what parameters are used, etc?
2.4: Sel: what libraries are used for stopping power values?
3.2: "Obvious large error bars can be seen in the low energy region": please provide insight as to why uncertainties are larger for the low energy region. If my understanding is correct, Figure 4, the incoming beam energy is 83.8 MeV. Then at a depth of 2 cm, what is the average proton energy?
Table 1 and 2 are spread across 2 pages
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
The manuscript has been significantly improved in clarity and writing quality. I have no further comments.
Author Response
Thanks for your kind review.
