Abstract
Autism is on the rise, with 1 in 88 children receiving a diagnosis in the United States, yet the process for diagnosis remains cumbersome and time consuming. Research has shown that home videos of children can help increase the accuracy of diagnosis. However the use of videos in the diagnostic process is uncommon. In the present study, we assessed the feasibility of applying a gold-standard diagnostic instrument to brief and unstructured home videos and tested whether video analysis can enable more rapid detection of the core features of autism outside of clinical environments. We collected 100 public videos from YouTube of children ages 1–15 with either a self-reported diagnosis of an ASD (N = 45) or not (N = 55). Four non-clinical raters independently scored all videos using one of the most widely adopted tools for behavioral diagnosis of autism, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic (ADOS). The classification accuracy was 96.8%, with 94.1% sensitivity and 100% specificity, the inter-rater correlation for the behavioral domains on the ADOS was 0.88, and the diagnoses matched a trained clinician in all but 3 of 22 randomly selected video cases. Despite the diversity of videos and non-clinical raters, our results indicate that it is possible to achieve high classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity as well as clinically acceptable inter-rater reliability with nonclinical personnel. Our results also demonstrate the potential for video-based detection of autism in short, unstructured home videos and further suggests that at least a percentage of the effort associated with detection and monitoring of autism may be mobilized and moved outside of traditional clinical environments.
Highlights
In the United States, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is typically diagnosed in children at four years of age with an estimated 27% undiagnosed by eight years of age [1]
Previous home video studies showed that ASD and non-ASD children differ in frequency of responding to name [10], gaze [13], smiling [14], and stereotypic motor behaviors [15]
We identified and analyzed 100 videos on YouTube that met our criteria for ASD (45 videos) and non-ASD (55 videos)
Summary
In the United States, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is typically diagnosed in children at four years of age with an estimated 27% undiagnosed by eight years of age [1]. To better understand the developmental progression of ASD and identify distinguishing behaviors between ASD and non-ASD children, a number of studies focused on retrospective home video analysis [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Previous home video studies showed that ASD and non-ASD children differ in frequency of responding to name [10], gaze [13], smiling [14], and stereotypic motor behaviors [15]. Home videos are considered a more accurate representation of early events than parental recall [10], and could be of value in future efforts focused on lowering the average age of diagnosis in the Unites States and abroad
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
