Characterization of autism spectrum disorder with spontaneous hemodynamic activity

Jun Li; Lina Qiu; Lingyu Xu; Ernest V Pedapati; Craig A Erickson; Ulas Sunar

doi:10.1364/BOE.7.003871

Characterization of autism spectrum disorder with spontaneous hemodynamic activity

Biomed Opt Express. 2016 Sep 6;7(10):3871-3881. doi: 10.1364/BOE.7.003871. eCollection 2016 Oct 1.

Authors

Jun Li¹, Lina Qiu², Lingyu Xu³, Ernest V Pedapati⁴, Craig A Erickson⁴, Ulas Sunar⁵

Affiliations

¹ South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
² South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China; Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
³ School of Computer Engineering & Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200072, China.
⁴ Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA.
⁵ Department of Biomedical, Industrial and Human Factors Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, OH 45435, USA.

Abstract

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to investigate spontaneous hemodynamic activity in the temporal cortex for typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Forty-seven children participated in the experiments including twenty-five with ASD. Compared with TD children, children with ASD showed weaker bilateral resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC), but much stronger fluctuation magnitude in terms of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO₂) and deoxy-hemoglobin (Hb). Differentiating between ASD and TD based on a support vector machine (SVM) model including bilateral RSFC and the fluctuation power of HbO₂ and Hb as variables could achieve high accurate classification with sensitivity of 81.6% and specificity of 94.6%. This study demonstrates optical brain imaging has the potential for screening children with risk of ASD.

Keywords: (170.2655) Functional monitoring and imaging; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging; (170.4580) Optical diagnostics for medicine.