Unified framework for early stage status prediction of autism based on infant structural magnetic resonance imaging

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a developmental disability that is diagnosed at about 2 years of age based on abnormal behaviors. Existing neuroimaging‐based methods for the prediction of ASD typically focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); however, most of these fMRI‐based studies include subjects older than 5 years of age. Due to challenges in the application of fMRI for infants, structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has increasingly received attention in the field for early status prediction of ASD. In this study, we propose an automated prediction framework based on infant sMRI at about 24 months of age. Specifically, by leveraging an infant‐dedicated pipeline, iBEAT V2.0 Cloud, we derived segmentation and parcellation maps from infant sMRI. We employed a convolutional neural network to extract features from pairwise maps and a Siamese network to distinguish whether paired subjects were from the same or different classes. As compared to T1w imaging without segmentation and parcellation maps, our proposed approach with segmentation and parcellation maps yielded greater sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of ASD prediction, which was validated using two datasets with different imaging protocols/scanners and was confirmed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Furthermore, comparison with state‐of‐the‐art methods demonstrated the superior effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Finally, attention maps were generated to identify subject‐specific autism effects, supporting the reasonability of the predictive results. Collectively, these findings demonstrate the utility of our unified framework for the early‐stage status prediction of ASD by sMRI. LAY SUMMARY: The status prediction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at an early age is highly desirable, as early intervention may significantly reduce autism symptoms. However, current methods for diagnosing young children are limited to behavioral assays. In this study, we propose an automated method for ASD status prediction at the age of 24 months that uses infant structural magnetic resonance imaging to identify neural features.