Identification of Pathogenetic Brain Regions via Neuroimaging Data for Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a kind of neurodevelopmental disorder that often occurs in children and has a hidden onset. Patients usually have lagged development of communication ability and social behavior and thus suffer an unhealthy physical and mental state. Evidence has indicated that diseases related to ASD have commonalities in brain imaging characteristics. This study aims to study the pathogenesis of ASD based on brain imaging data to locate the ASD-related brain regions. Specifically, we collected the functional magnetic resonance image data of 479 patients with ASD and 478 normal subjects matched in age and gender and used a machine-learning framework named random support vector machine cluster to extract distinctive brain regions from the preprocessed data. According to the experimental results, compared with other existing approaches, the method used in this study can more accurately distinguish patients from normal individuals based on brain imaging data. At the same time, this study found that the development of ASD was highly correlated with certain brain regions, e.g., lingual gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, medial gyrus, insular lobe, and olfactory cortex. This study explores the effectiveness of a novel machine-learning approach in the study of ASD brain imaging and provides a reference brain area for the medical research and clinical treatment of ASD.