Early Detection of Autism in Children Using Transfer Learning

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a challenging and complex neuro-development syndrome that affects the child’s language, speech, social skills, communication skills, and logical thinking ability. The early detection of ASD is essential for delivering effective, timely interventions. Various facial features such as a lack of eye contact, showing uncommon hand or body movements, babbling or talking in an unusual tone, and not using common gestures could be used to detect and classify ASD at an early stage. Our study aimed to develop a deep transfer learning model to facilitate the early detection of ASD based on facial features. A dataset of facial images of autistic and non-autistic children was collected from the Kaggle data repository and was used to develop the transfer learning AlexNet (ASDDTLA) model. Our model achieved a detection accuracy of 87.7% and performed better than other established ASD detection models. Therefore, this model could facilitate the early detection of ASD in clinical practice.