Autism spectrum disorder detection using diffusion tensor imaging and machine learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disorder that manifests in social and behavioral deficits. The onset of symptoms may begin in early childhood, but diagnosis is often subjective, and scores can vary between specialists. Several studies suggest that diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)-derived indicators of anisotropy in water diffusion at microstructural level could be biomarkers for this disorder. Emerging advances in neuroimaging and machine learning can provide a fast and objective alternative for its early diagnosis. We propose and evaluate a machine-learning (ML)-powered computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the detection of ASD from DTI. For the development and validation of the system we used the ABIDE II database (n = 150). The system involves processing the raw DTI to obtain fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), radial diffusivity (RD) and axial diffusivity (AD) in 25 ASD-relevant regions of interest defined in the JHU ICBM-DTI-81 White-Matter Labeled Atlas to train a ML binary classifier. We evaluated the use of support vector machine (SVM) with various kernels and random forest (RF) optimized for computational efficiency. The best configuration, which used RF, had a sensitivity of 100%, accuracy of 95.65%, precision of 91.67%, and a specificity of 91.67%. An external test yielded 94.73% sensitivity, 97.37% accuracy, and 100% in precision and specificity. Results in this small sample show the generalization power of the best model, and the utility of carefully leveraging imaging information with clinical knowledge on relevant white matter regions commonly affected by ASD to design a CAD system for ASD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".