Brainstem fMRI

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a fine article. I have very little to criticize.

l.61: "Here, the physiological noises are introduced [..]" I do not think you can used "noise" in a plural form here. It gets a different meaning.

Figure 1: The coronal and sagittal slices should be presented in an isotropic way (i.e. without the distortion in z-direction).

Author Response

Response:

Many thanks for the suggestions. We have changed “physiological noises” to “physiological noise”. We also prepare a new figure without the distortion in z-direction.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The author writes, "Only a few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) researches investigating the brainstem have been reported because of a number of technical challenges." However, if you search for "brainstem" and "MRI" in the article search engine for the past two years, you will find that a reasonable number of articles have these words in their titles. If so, isn't it necessary to revise the description written on the premise that there are few studies on the brainstem? Also, many of the brainstem treatises listed in the bibliography are a bit old, so you should pick up recent treatises and have a brief discussion of the issues in those treatises along with a review.

A native English check is required. For example, "research (es)" in the above sentence is generally treated as an uncountable noun.

Author Response

Many thanks for the suggestions. We have introduced some recently published studies in the revised manuscript.

We can find a reasonable number of articles if searching for "brainstem" and "MRI" in the search engine, whereas this manuscript aims to briefly introduce functional MRI of human brainstem. Studies on brainstem fMRI are much less than brain fMRI. Therefore, we have introduced “unlike a huge number of brain fMRI reports, only a much less number of fMRI studies investigating the brainstem have been reported” in the revised version. On the basis of your comments, we have also changed several words to more directly compare the two conditions (brain fMRI and brainstem fMRI).

English has been checked more carefully and we have corrected the conditions you mentioned.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no further requests.

Reviewer 2 Report

The author has made the necessary corrections. I think the editor may decide to publish.