An intelligent approach for autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and rehabilitation features identification

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects 1 in 100 children globally. Early detection and intervention can enhance life quality for individuals diagnosed with ASD. This research utilizes the support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) method in its approach for ASD classification using the phenotypic and Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) Brain Atlas datasets of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange preprocessed dataset. The functional connectivity matrix (FCM) is computed for the AAL data, generating 6670 features representing pair-wise brain region activity. The SVM-RFE feature selection method was applied five times to the FCM data, thus determining the optimal number of features to be 750 for the best performing support vector machine (SVM) model, corresponding to a dimensionality reduction of 88.76%. Pertinent phenotypic data features were manually selected and processed. Subsequently, five experiments were conducted, each representing a different combination of the features used for training and testing the linear SVM, deep neural networks, one-dimensional convolutional neural networks, and random forest machine learning models. These models are fine-tuned using grid search cross-validation (CV). The models are evaluated on various metrics using 5-fold CV. The most relevant brain regions from the optimal feature set are identified by ranking the SVM-RFE feature weights. The SVM-RFE approach achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 90.33% on the linear SVM model using the Data Processing Assistant for Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging pipeline. The SVM model’s ability to rank the features used based on their importance provides clarity into the factors contributing to the diagnosis. The thalamus right, rectus right, and temporal middle left AAL brain regions, among others, were identified as having the highest number of connections to other brain regions. These results highlight the importance of using traditional ML models for improved interpretability and provide insight into which features to target for ASD patient rehabilitation. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.