Crowdsourced privacy-preserved feature tagging of short home videos for machine learning ASD detection

Sci Rep. 2021 Apr 7;11(1):7620. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-87059-4.

Abstract

Standard medical diagnosis of mental health conditions requires licensed experts who are increasingly outnumbered by those at risk, limiting reach. We test the hypothesis that a trustworthy crowd of non-experts can efficiently annotate behavioral features needed for accurate machine learning detection of the common childhood developmental disorder Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) for children under 8 years old. We implement a novel process for identifying and certifying a trustworthy distributed workforce for video feature extraction, selecting a workforce of 102 workers from a pool of 1,107. Two previously validated ASD logistic regression classifiers, evaluated against parent-reported diagnoses, were used to assess the accuracy of the trusted crowd's ratings of unstructured home videos. A representative balanced sample (N = 50 videos) of videos were evaluated with and without face box and pitch shift privacy alterations, with AUROC and AUPRC scores > 0.98. With both privacy-preserving modifications, sensitivity is preserved (96.0%) while maintaining specificity (80.0%) and accuracy (88.0%) at levels comparable to prior classification methods without alterations. We find that machine learning classification from features extracted by a certified nonexpert crowd achieves high performance for ASD detection from natural home videos of the child at risk and maintains high sensitivity when privacy-preserving mechanisms are applied. These results suggest that privacy-safeguarded crowdsourced analysis of short home videos can help enable rapid and mobile machine-learning detection of developmental delays in children.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Algorithms
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder / diagnosis*
  • Behavior Observation Techniques / methods*
  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Crowdsourcing / methods*
  • Data Accuracy
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Logistic Models
  • Machine Learning
  • Male
  • Mental Disorders / diagnosis
  • Middle Aged
  • Sensitivity and Specificity