Early Diagnosis of Autism Disease by Multi-channel CNNs

Currently there are still no early biomarkers to detect infants with risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is mainly diagnosed based on behavior observations at three or four years old. Since intervention efforts may miss a critical developmental window after 2 years old, it is significant to identify imaging-based biomarkers for early diagnosis of ASD. Although some methods using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for brain disease prediction have been proposed in the last decade, few of them were developed for predicting ASD in early age. Inspired by deep multi-instance learning, in this paper, we propose a patch-level data-expanding strategy for multi-channel convolutional neural networks to automatically identify infants with risk of ASD in early age. Experiments were conducted on the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR), with results showing that our proposed method can significantly improve the performance of early diagnosis of ASD.