Identification of autism spectrum disorder based on functional near-infrared spectroscopy using adaptive spatiotemporal graph convolution network

The accurate diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is of great practical significance in clinical practice. The spontaneous hemodynamic fluctuations were collected by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) from the bilateral frontal and temporal cortices of typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD. Since traditional machine learning and deep learning methods cannot make full use of the potential spatial dependence between variable pairs, and require a long time series to diagnose ASD. Therefore, we use adaptive spatiotemporal graph convolution network (ASGCN) and short time series to classify ASD and TD. To capture spatial and temporal features of fNIRS multivariable time series without the pre-defined graph, we combined the improved adaptive graph convolution network (GCN) and gated recurrent units (GRU). We conducted a series of experiments on the fNIRS dataset, and found that only using 2.1 s short time series could achieve high precision classification, with an accuracy of 95.4%. This suggests that our approach may have the potential to detect pathological signals in autism patients within 2.1 s. In different brain regions, the left frontal lobe has the best classification effect, and the abnormalities occur more frequently in left hemisphere and frontal lobe region. Moreover, we also found that there were correlations between multiple channels, which had different degrees of influence on the classification of ASD. From this, we can also generalize to a wider range, there may be potential correlations between different brain regions. This may help to better understand the cortical mechanism of ASD.