A novel CAD system for autism diagnosis using structural and functional MRI

This paper introduces a comprehensive computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for autism diagnosis that integrates anatomical and functional information of the brain using both structural and functional magnetic resonance (MR) brain images. In order to move towards the idea of personalized medicine, analysis of the brain's Brodmann areas (BAs) is conducted to reach a diagnosis decision on the local areas. This local analysis will help clinicians allocate the subject on the autism spectrum as well as correlate autism abnormalities to the areas responsible for certain skills, such as cognitive ones. The diagnosis is done through several analysis steps on both structural and functional MRI volumes. First, anatomical features are extracted from the cerebral cortex (Cx) and the cerebral white matter (CWM) of structural MR images. A monetary reward functional MR experiment is also held to get the areas of activation in the brains of the participants in response to the applied task. Next, all the extracted features are fed to a multi-level deep network for both local and global diagnosis. The CAD system has been evaluated using subjects from the NDAR database (23 – 210 months), achieving a global classification accuracy of 94.7% based on fusing both modalities. Moreover, brain maps are shown for different autistic subjects to indicate the strength of association of each BA with autism, which supports the idea of personalized medicine. The proposed CAD system, along with the idea of local feature extraction and diagnosis, holds the promise for being capable to resolve autism endophenotypes.