Two neuroanatomical subtypes of males with autism spectrum disorder revealed using semi-supervised machine learning

BACKGROUND: Clinical and etiological varieties remain major obstacles to decompose heterogeneity in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Recently, neuroimaging raised new hope to identify neurosubtypes of ASD for further understanding the biological mechanisms behind the disorder. METHODS: In this study, brain structural MRI data and clinical measures of 221 male subjects with ASD and 257 healthy controls were selected from 7 independent sites from the Autism Brain Image Data Exchange database (ABIDE). Heterogeneity through discriminative analysis (HYDRA), a recently-proposed semi-supervised clustering method was utilized to divide individuals with ASD into several neurosubtypes by regional volumetric measures of gray matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid. Voxel-wise volume, clinical measures, dynamic resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R-fMRI) measures among different neurosubtypes of ASD were explored. In addition, support vector machine (SVM) model was applied to test whether the neurosubtyping of ASD could improve diagnostic accuracy of ASD. RESULTS: Two neurosubtypes of ASD with different voxel-wise volumetric patterns were revealed. The full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ), verbal IQ, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) total scores and ADOS severity scores were significantly different between the two neurosubtypes, the total intracranial volume was correlated with performance IQ in Subtype 1 and was correlated with ADOS communication score and ADOS social score in Subtype 2. Compared with Subtype 2, Subtype 1 showed lower dynamic R-fMRI measures, lower dynamic functional architecture stability, higher mean and lower standard deviation (SD) of concordance among dynamic R-fMRI measures in cerebellum. In addition, classification accuracies between ASD neurosubtypes and healthy controls were significantly improved compared with classification accuracy between entire ASD group and healthy controls. LIMITATIONS: The present study excluded female subjects and left-handed subjects, which limited the ability to investigate the associations between these factors and the heterogeneity of ASD. CONCLUSIONS: The two distinct neuroanatomical subtypes of ASD validated by other data modalities not only adds reliability of the result, but also bridges from brain phenomenology to clinical behavior. The current neurosubtypes of ASD could facilitate understanding the neuropathology of this disorder and could be potentially used to improve clinical decision-making process and optimize treatment. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13229-022-00489-3.