Principal Subspace of Dynamic Functional Connectivity for Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder

The study of functional connectivity (FC) of the brain using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has gained traction for uncovering FC patterns related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It is believed that the neurodynamic components of neuroimaging data enhance the measurement of the FC of brain nodes. Hence, methods based on linear correlations of rs-fMRI may not accurately represent the FC patterns of brain nodes in ASD patients. In this study, we proposed a new biomarker for ASD detection based on wavelet coherence and singular value decomposition. In essence, the proposed method provides a novel feature-vector based on extraction of the principal component of the neuronal dynamic FC patterns of rs-fMRI BOLD signals. The method, known as principal wavelet coherence (PWC), is implemented by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) on wavelet coherence (WC) and extracting the first principal component. ASD biomarkers are selected by analyzing the relationship between ASD severity scores and the amplitude of wavelet coherence fluctuation (WCF). The experimental rs-fMRI dataset is obtained from the publicly available Autism Brain Image Data Exchange (ABIDE), and includes 505 ASD patients and 530 normal control subjects. The data are randomly divided into 90% for training and cross-validation and the remaining 10% unseen data used for testing the performance of the trained network. With 95.2% accuracy on the ABIDE database, our ASD classification technique has better performance than previous methods. The results of this study illustrate the potential of PWC in representing FC dynamics between brain nodes and opens up possibilities for its clinical application in diagnosis of other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Automated summary

This study proposed a new method for detecting autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on wavelet coherence and singular value decomposition. The method, called principal wavelet coherence (PWC), showed better performance in representing functional connectivity (FC) dynamics between brain nodes compared to previous methods. The results suggest the potential of PWC in diagnosing other neuropsychiatric disorders.