Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification Research Articles

Categorical and dimensional approaches in diagnosis using Asperger syndrome as an example

In the latest medical classifications (DSM-5 and ICD-11), Asperger syndrome (AS) is no longer a separate nosological entity. It has been included in the category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which has significantly affected the lack of differential diagnoses. This is not the best solution for people with ASD, as it does not take into account the clear distinctions between autism and Asperger syndrome despite the presence of similarities. In addition to the similarities, Asperger syndrome is also characterized by numerous differences from autism, and these are not limited to differences of a quantitative nature (the severity of the deficits present). The dominance of the categorical treatment of the phenomena, both in the DSM and the ICD, plays a major role in perpetuating the problem.

Aberrant dynamic and static functional connectivity of the striatum across specific low-frequency bands in patients with autism spectrum disorder

BackgroundDysfunctions of the striatum have been repeatedly observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, previous studies have explored the static functional connectivity (sFC) of the striatum in a single frequency band, ignoring the dynamics and frequency specificity of brain FC. Therefore, we investigated the dynamic FC (dFC) and sFC of the striatum in the slow-4 (0.027-0.073 Hz) and slow-5 (0.01-0.027 Hz) frequency bands. MethodsData of 47 ASD patients and 47 typically developing (TD) controls were obtained from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) database. A seed-based approach was used to compute the dFC and sFC. Then, a two-sample t-test was performed. For regions showing abnormal sFC and dFC, we performed clinical correlation analysis and constructed support vector machine (SVM) models. ResultsThe middle frontal gyrus (MFG), precuneus, and medial superior frontal gyrus (mPFC) showed both dynamic and static alterations. The reduced striatal dFC in the right MFG was associated with autism symptoms. The dynamic‒static FC model had a great performance in ASD classification, with 95.83 % accuracy. ConclusionsThe striatal dFC and sFC were altered in ASD, which were frequency specific. Examining brain activity using dynamic and static FC provides a comprehensive view of brain activity.

Applying Eye Tracking with Deep Learning Techniques for Early-Stage Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) poses a complex challenge to researchers and practitioners, with its multifaceted etiology and varied manifestations. Timely intervention is critical in enhancing the developmental outcomes of individuals with ASD. This paper underscores the paramount significance of early detection and diagnosis as a pivotal precursor to effective intervention. To this end, integrating advanced technological tools, specifically eye-tracking technology and deep learning algorithms, is investigated for its potential to discriminate between children with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers. By employing these methods, the research aims to contribute to refining early detection strategies and support mechanisms. This study introduces innovative deep learning models grounded in convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures, employing an eye-tracking dataset for training. Of note, performance outcomes have been realised, with the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) achieving an accuracy of 96.44%, the gated recurrent unit (GRU) attaining 97.49%, the CNN-LSTM hybridising to 97.94%, and the LSTM achieving the most remarkable accuracy result of 98.33%. These outcomes underscore the efficacy of the applied methodologies and the potential of advanced computational frameworks in achieving substantial accuracy levels in ASD detection and classification.

Assessing Predictive Ability of Dynamic Time Warping Functional Connectivity for ASD Classification.

Functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) is a technique used to study the functional connectedness of distinct regions of the brain by measuring the temporal correlation between their blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals. fcMRI is typically measured with the Pearson correlation (PC), which assumes that there is no lag between time series. Dynamic time warping (DTW) is an alternative measure of similarity between time series that is robust to such time lags. We used PC fcMRI data and DTW fcMRI data as predictors in machine learning models for classifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD). When combined with dimension reduction techniques, such as principal component analysis, functional connectivity estimated with DTW showed greater predictive ability than functional connectivity estimated with PC. Our results suggest that DTW fcMRI can be a suitable alternative measure that may be characterizing fcMRI in a different, but complementary, way to PC fcMRI that is worth continued investigation. In studying different variants of cross validation (CV), our results suggest that, when it is necessary to tune model hyperparameters and assess model performance at the same time, a K-fold CV nested within leave-one-out CV may be a competitive contender in terms of performance and computational speed, especially when sample size is not large.

A Framework to Diagnose Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Morphological Connectivity of sMRI and XGBoost.

In this study, we automated the diagnostic procedure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with the help of anatomical alterations found in structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data of the ASD brain and machine learning tools. Initially, the sMRI data was preprocessed using the FreeSurfer toolbox. Further, the brain regions were segmented into 148 regions of interest using the Destrieux atlas. Features such as volume, thickness, surface area, and mean curvature were extracted for each brain region, and the morphological connectivity was computed using Pearson correlation. These morphological connections were fed to XGBoost for feature reduction and to build the diagnostic model. The results showed an average accuracy of 94.16% for the top 18 features. The frontal and limbic regions contributed more features to the classification model. Our proposed method is thus effective for the classification of ASD and can also be useful for the screening of other similar neurological disorders.

Age-Specific Diagnostic Classification of ASD Using Deep Learning Approaches.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a highly heterogeneous condition, due to high variance in its etiology, comorbidity, pathogenesis, severity, genetics, and brain functional connectivity (FC). This makes it devoid of any robust universal biomarker. This study aims to analyze the role of age and multivariate patterns in brain FC and their accountability in diagnosing ASD by deep learning algorithms. We utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging data of three age groups (6 to 11, 11 to 18, and 6 to 18 years), available with public databases ABIDE-I and ABIDE-II, to discriminate between ASD and typically developing. The blood-oxygen-level dependent time series were extracted using the Gordon's, Harvard Oxford and Diedrichsen's atlases, over 236 regions of interest, as 236x236 sized FC matrices for each participant, with Pearson correlations. The feature sets, in the form of FC heat maps were computed with respect to each age group and were fed to a convolutional neural network, such as MobileNetV2 and DenseNet201 to build age-specific diagnostic models. The results revealed that DenseNet201 was able to adapt and extract better features from the heat maps, and hence returned better accuracy scores. The age-specific dataset, with participants of ages 6 to 11 years, performed best, followed by 11 to 18 years and 6 to 18 years, with accuracy scores of 72.19%, 71.88%, and 69.74% respectively, when tested using the DenseNet201. Our results suggest that age-specific diagnostic models are able to counter heterogeneity present in ASD, and that enables better discrimination.

Deep learning with image-based autism spectrum disorder analysis: A systematic review

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a collection of neuro-developmental disorders associated with social, communicational, and behavioral difficulties. Early detection thereof is necessary to mitigate the adverse effects of this disorder by initiating special education in schools and rehabilitation centers. Two methods are available for diagnosing and rehabilitating ASD. The first is the manual method (i.e., an observation- or interview-based approach), in which the disorder is diagnosed through observation or by interviewing a parent or caregiver. This method is time-consuming, subjective, and mostly comprises the examination of behavioral symptoms. The other method involves automatic diagnosis using traditional machine learning (ML)- and modern deep learning (DL)-based approaches that rely on image analysis. Indeed, the amount of research literature concerned with the evaluation of the usefulness of DL-based methods that process images or video data to diagnose ASD to improve patients’ lives has increased significantly. This paper presents a systematic review of the DL-based approach involving the analysis of images or videos in autism research. The review covers studies that were published from 2017 to June 2023 and were indexed in PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar. The results are reported according to the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. A total of 130 studies were included in the analysis. Eligible papers were categorized based on the different features extracted as input for the DL-based approach. Existing well-known public and private datasets that include images or videos for autism research are extensively reviewed and discussed in this systematic review. In addition, different rehabilitation strategies that have been shown to be highly beneficial for ASD individuals are included. Finally, various challenges presented by the automated detection, classification, and rehabilitation of ASD are discussed. The review concludes that the use of DL for the precise and affordable diagnosis of autism is increasing substantially. Our findings are expected to significantly benefit researchers, therapists, psychologists, and relevant stakeholders to advance ASD screening, monitoring, and diagnosis with the aid of a DL-based approach that entails image or video analysis.

A heterogeneous graph convolutional attention network method for classification of autism spectrum disorder

BackgroundAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a serious developmental disorder of the brain. Recently, various deep learning methods based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data have been developed for the classification of ASD. Among them, graph neural networks, which generalize deep neural network models to graph structured data, have shown great advantages. However, in graph neural methods, because the graphs constructed are homogeneous, the phenotype information of the subjects cannot be fully utilized. This affects the improvement of the classification performance.MethodsTo fully utilize the phenotype information, this paper proposes a heterogeneous graph convolutional attention network (HCAN) model to classify ASD. By combining an attention mechanism and a heterogeneous graph convolutional network, important aggregated features can be extracted in the HCAN. The model consists of a multilayer HCAN feature extractor and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. First, a heterogeneous population graph was constructed based on the fMRI and phenotypic data. Then, a multilayer HCAN is used to mine graph-based features from the heterogeneous graph. Finally, the extracted features are fed into an MLP for the final classification.ResultsThe proposed method is assessed on the autism brain imaging data exchange (ABIDE) repository. In total, 871 subjects in the ABIDE I dataset are used for the classification task. The best classification accuracy of 82.9% is achieved. Compared to the other methods using exactly the same subjects in the literature, the proposed method achieves superior performance to the best reported result.ConclusionsThe proposed method can effectively integrate heterogeneous graph convolutional networks with a semantic attention mechanism so that the phenotype features of the subjects can be fully utilized. Moreover, it shows great potential in the diagnosis of brain functional disorders with fMRI data.

Understand ASD differences in women for accurate referral, diagnosis, accommodations

Leo Kanner (1943) and Hans Asperger (1944), whose studies included only boys, initially and independently identified autism, noting three basic characteristics: (1) social difficulties, (2) communication problems, and (3) repetitive and restrictive activities. But it wasn’t until 1980 that the term “autism” appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‐III. Not until 1994 did Asperger's syndrome, or high‐functioning autism, appear in the DSM‐IV. And in the 2013 DSM‐5, Asperger's syndrome disappeared, merging into the integrated category of autism spectrum disorder.

Self-supervised ensembled learning for autism spectrum classification

PurposeDeep learning has made remarkable progress in classifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using neuroimaging data. However, the current methods rely mainly on supervised learning, which requires a large amount of manually labeled data, making it an expensive and difficult task to scale. MethodsTo overcome this limitation, we propose a novel ensemble-based framework that learns a transferable and generalizable visual representation from different self-supervised features for the downstream task of ASD classification. This framework dynamically learns a superior representation by aggregating complementary information in the frequency domain from independent self-supervised features with limited data. Additionally, to address the information loss caused by the dimensionality reduction of 3D fMRI data, we propose a thresholding algorithm to optimally extract the most discriminant features from 2D rs-fMRI data. ResultsExperimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 19.69% on the ABIDE-1 dataset with a 10-fold cross-validation accuracy of 94.51%. ConclusionThe proposed method learns a transferrable and generalizable ensembled representation by leveraging complementary information encoded in different self-supervised representations for ASD classification.

Interpretable Fuzzy System for Early Detection Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a chronic developmental impairment that impairs a person's ability to communicate and connect with others. In people with ASD, social contact and reciprocal communication are continually jeopardized. People with ASD may require varying degrees of psychological aid in order to gain greater independence, or they may require ongoing supervision and care. Early discovery of ASD results in more time allocated to individual rehabilitation. In this study, we proposed the fuzzy classifier for ASD classification and tested its interpretability with the fuzzy index and Nauck's index to ensure its reliability. Then, the rule base is created with the Gauje tool. The fuzzy rules were then applied to the fuzzy neural network to predict autism. The suggested model is built on the Mamdani rule set and optimized using the backpropagation algorithm. The proposed model uses a heuristic function and pattern evolution to classify dataset. The model is evaluated using the benchmark metrics accuracy and F-measure, and Nauck's index and fuzzy index are employed to quantify interpretability. The proposed model is superior in its ability to accurately detect ASD, with an average accuracy rate of 91% compared to other classifiers.

A Riemannian Framework for Structurally Curated Functional Clustering of Brain White Matter Fibers.

White matter (WM) consists of fibers that transmit information from one brain region to another, and functional fiber clustering that combines diffusion and functional MRI provides a novel perspective for exploring the functional architecture of axonal fibers. However, existing methods only concern functional signals in gray matter (GM), whereas the connecting fibers may not transmit relevant functional signals. There has been growing evidence that neural activity is encoded in WM BOLD signals as well, which provides rich multimodal information for fiber clustering. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive Riemannian framework for functional fiber clustering using WM BOLD signals along fibers. Specifically, we derive a novel metric that is highly discriminative of different functional classes while reducing the variability within classes and, in the meantime, enables low-dimensional coding of high-dimensional data. Our in vivo experiments show that the proposed framework is able to achieve clustering results with inter-subject consistency and functional homogeneity. In addition, we develop an atlas of WM functional architecture for standardizable yet flexible use and exemplify a machine-learning-based application for the classification of autism spectrum disorders, which further demonstrates the great potential of our approach in practical applications.

Understand ASD differences in women for accurate referral, diagnosis, and accommodation

Leo Kanner (1943) and Hans Asperger (1944), whose studies included only boys, initially and independently identified autism, noting three basic characteristics: (1) social difficulties, (2) communication problems, and (3) repetitive and restrictive activities. (see Leo Kanner, Autistic disturbances of affective contact, 2 Nervous Child 217 (1943); Hans Asperger, ‘Autistic psychopathy’ in childhood (U. Frith, trans. 1991)). But it was not until 1980 that the term “autism” appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‐III. Not until 1994 did Asperger's syndrome, or high‐functioning autism, appear in the DSM‐IV. And in the 2013 DSM‐5, Asperger's syndrome disappeared, merging into the integrated category of autism spectrum disorder.

Learning to Fuse Multiple Brain Functional Networks for Automated Autism Identification.

Functional connectivity network (FCN) has become a popular tool to identify potential biomarkers for brain dysfunction, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Due to its importance, researchers have proposed many methods to estimate FCNs from resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data. However, the existing FCN estimation methods usually only capture a single relationship between brain regions of interest (ROIs), e.g., linear correlation, nonlinear correlation, or higher-order correlation, thus failing to model the complex interaction among ROIs in the brain. Additionally, such traditional methods estimate FCNs in an unsupervised way, and the estimation process is independent of the downstream tasks, which makes it difficult to guarantee the optimal performance for ASD identification. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-FCN fusion framework for rs-fMRI-based ASD classification. Specifically, for each subject, we first estimate multiple FCNs using different methods to encode rich interactions among ROIs from different perspectives. Then, we use the label information (ASD vs. healthy control (HC)) to learn a set of fusion weights for measuring the importance/discrimination of those estimated FCNs. Finally, we apply the adaptively weighted fused FCN on the ABIDE dataset to identify subjects with ASD from HCs. The proposed FCN fusion framework is straightforward to implement and can significantly improve diagnostic accuracy compared to traditional and state-of-the-art methods.

A Multi-Site Anti-Interference Neural Network for ASD Classification

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that can reduce quality of life and burden families. However, there is a lack of objectivity in clinical diagnosis, so it is very important to develop a method for early and accurate diagnosis. Multi-site data increases sample size and statistical power, which is convenient for training deep learning models. However, heterogeneity between sites will affect ASD recognition. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-site anti-interference neural network for ASD classification. The resting state brain functional image data provided by the multi-site is used to train the ASD classification model. The model consists of three modules. First, the site feature extraction module is used to quantify the inter-site heterogeneity, in which the autoencoder is used to reduce the feature dimension. Secondly, the presentation learning module is used to extract classification features. Finally, the anti-interference classification module uses the output of the first two modules as labels and inputs for multi-task adversarial training to complete the representation learning that is not affected by the confounding of sites, so as to realize the adaptive anti-interference ASD classification. The results show that the average accuracy of ten-fold cross validation is 75.56%, which is better than the existing studies. The innovation of our proposed method lies in the problem that the traditional single-task deep learning ASD classification model will be affected by the heterogeneity of multi-site data and interfere with the classification. Our method eliminates the influence of multi-site factors on feature extraction through multi-task adversarial training, so that the model can better adapt to the heterogeneity of multi-site data. Meanwhile, large-scale 1DconV is introduced to extract features of brain functional network, which provides support for the interpretability of the model. This method is expected to take advantage of multiple sites and provide reference for early diagnosis and treatment of ASD.

Multi-Modal Data Fusion for Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Phenotypic and Neuroimaging Data

Multi-Modal Data Fusion for Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Phenotypic and Neuroimaging Data

Classification of autism based on short-term spontaneous hemodynamic fluctuations using an adaptive graph neural network

Background:Short-term spontaneous hemodynamic fluctuations were collected by the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system to classify children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical development (TD), and to explore abnormalities in the left inferior frontal gyrus in ASD. Methods:Using the fNIRS data of 25 children with ASD and 22 children with TD, a graph neural network combined with the temporal convolution module and the graph convolution module was used, to extract the spatio-temporal features of the data and achieve accurate classification of ASD. Results:The graph neural network was used to obtain a good classification result in the left inferior frontal gyrus, with an accuracy of 97.1%, precision of 95.1%, and specificity of 93.4%. It was found that the 5th channel (which is located in BA 10) and the 8th channel (which is located in BA 47) in the left inferior frontal gyrus were closely correlated with ASD. Comparison with previously used method(s):Compared with the previous deep learning model using the same input, the accuracy of our model has increased by up to 13%, and the correlation between channels in the left inferior frontal gyrus area with the best classification effect was explored through the graph neural network. Conclusion:The adaptive graph neural network (AGNN) model may be able to mine more valuable information to distinguish ASD from TD and in addition, the left inferior frontal gyrus may have greater investigative value.

Contrastive Multi-view Composite Graph Convolutional Networks Based on Contribution Learning for Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification.

The resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) faithfully reflects the brain activities and thus provides a promising tool for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) classification. Up to now, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been successfully applied in rs-fMRI based ASD classification. However, most of these methods were developed based on functional connectivities (FCs) that only reflect low-level correlation between brain regions, without integrating both high-level discriminative knowledge and phenotypic information into classification. Besides, they suffered from the overfitting problem caused by insufficient training samples. To this end, we propose a novel contrastive multi-view composite GCN (CMV-CGCN) for ASD classification using both FCs and HOFCs. Specifically, a pair of graphs are constructed based on the FC and HOFC features of the subjects, respectively, and they share the phenotypic information in the graph edges. A novel contrastive multi-view learning method is proposed based on the consistent representation of both views. A contribution learning mechanism is further incorporated, encouraging the FC and HOFC features of different subjects to have various contribution in the contrastive multi-view learning. The proposed CMV-CGCN is evaluated on 613 subjects (including 286 ASD patients and 327 NCs) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). We demonstrate the performance of the method for ASD classification, which yields an accuracy of 75.20% and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7338. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ABIDE database.

Optimal transport based pyramid graph kernel for autism spectrum disorder diagnosis

Brain network, which characterizes the functional and structural interactions of brain regions with graph theory, has been widely utilized to diagnose brain diseases, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It is a challenge to measure the network (or graph) similarity in brain network analysis. Graph kernel (i.e., kernel defined on graphs) offers an efficient tool for measuring the similarity of paired brain networks and yields the excellent classification performance in brain disease diagnosis. However, most of the existing graph kernels neglected the hierarchical architecture information of brain networks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an optimal transport based pyramid graph kernel for measuring brain network similarity and then apply it to brain disease classification. The main idea is to transform brain networks into pyramid structures, which reflect the hierarchical architecture information of the brain network with multi-resolution histograms. The optimal transport distance in pyramid structures is calculated for measuring transport costs between paired brain networks. Finally, the optimal transport based pyramid graph kernel is computed based on this optimal transport distance. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal transport based pyramid graph kernel, the extensive experiments are performed in functional magnetic resonance imaging data of brain disease from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange database. The experimental results show that our proposed optimal transport based pyramid graph kernel outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in ASD classification tasks.

Research on Pattern Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Related to the Diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Research on Pattern Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Related to the Diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder