Advancing ASD identification with neuroimaging: a novel GARL methodology integrating Deep Q-Learning and generative adversarial networks

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects an individual's behavior, speech, and social interaction. Early and accurate diagnosis of ASD is pivotal for successful intervention. The limited availability of large datasets for neuroimaging investigations, however, poses a significant challenge to the timely and precise identification of ASD. To address this problem, we propose a breakthrough approach, GARL, for ASD diagnosis using neuroimaging data. GARL innovatively integrates the power of GANs and Deep Q-Learning to augment limited datasets and enhance diagnostic precision. We utilized the Autistic Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) I and II datasets and employed a GAN to expand these datasets, creating a more robust and diversified dataset for analysis. This approach not only captures the underlying sample distribution within ABIDE I and II but also employs deep reinforcement learning for continuous self-improvement, significantly enhancing the capability of the model to generalize and adapt. Our experimental results confirmed that GAN-based data augmentation effectively improved the performance of all prediction models on both datasets, with the combination of InfoGAN and DQN's GARL yielding the most notable improvement.