A Biomarker Characterizing Neurodevelopment with applications in Autism

John I Nurnberger,Jorge V José,Di Wu,Elizabeth B Torres

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-18902-w

Abstract

Despite great advances in neuroscience and genetic studies, our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders is still quite limited. An important reason is not having objective psychiatric clinical tests. Here we propose a quantitative neurodevelopment assessment by studying natural movement outputs. Movement is central to behaviors: It involves complex coordination, temporal alterations, and precise dynamic controls. We carefully analyzed the continuous movement output data, collected with high definition electromagnetic sensors at millisecond time scales. We unraveled new metrics containing striking physiological information that was unseen neither by using traditional motion assessments nor by naked eye observations. Our putative biomarker leads to precise individualized classifications. It illustrates clear differences between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) subjects from mature typical developing (TD) individuals. It provides an ASD complementary quantitative classification, which closely agrees with the clinicaly assessed functioning levels in the spectrum. It also illustrates TD potential age-related neurodevelopmental trajectories. Applying our movement biomarker to the parents of the ASD individuals studied in the cohort also shows a novel potential familial signature ASD tie. This paper proposes a putative behavioral biomarker to characterize the level of neurodevelopment with high predicting power, as illustrated in ASD subjects as an example.

Highlights

Neurodevelopment involves the structural growth and functional maturation of the central nervous system
When we examined the continuous speed profiles, especially their fluctuations, within each motion cycle, at millisecond time scales, they significantly differed across subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) vs. typical developing (TD) adults (Fig. 1E), despite the visual indistinguishability in their corresponding positional trajectories (Fig. 1D)
The work presented here was aimed at developing a data-driven approach to provide objective behavioral neurodevelopmental assessments for neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), to contribute at narrowing down the present wide gap between clinical behavioral observations and neuroscience studies

Summary

Introduction

Neurodevelopment involves the structural growth and functional maturation of the central nervous system. There is an important need of having more objective biomedical tests to precisely monitor human neurodevelopment and disease progression, aiding NDD diagnosis as well as guiding further research in this area. It is, of equal importance to study the corresponding behavioral outputs as well[14]. Goal directed reaching is learned since infancy, stabilizing through normal motor development that appears to occur between 5–7 years old, and between 7–10 years old[16,17,18,19] It remains a mystery how the mature sensorimotor system produces smooth motions. We go beyond the traditional kinematic analyses by developing novel and robust quantitative measures of the noise present in the motor outputs

Methods

Results

Conclusion