Cerebral blood flow measured by diffuse correlation spectroscopy in children with autism spectrum disorder

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) was used to measure resting-state cerebral blood flow (CBF) in temporal lobes of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children. Twenty-two children with ASD and 34 age-matched TD children were recruited to participate in the experiment. DCS signals were recorded with 3 long source-detector (SD) channels (SD distance = 22.0 mm) and 1 short SD channel (SD distance = 10.5 mm) from each side of the temporal lobe. Significant difference in CBF between left and right hemispheres was observed in ASD group, but not in TD group. With the degree of CBF lateralization as a discrimination feature, a leave-one-out ROC curve was plotted with the area-under-curve (AUC) value of 0.731 ± 0.010, indicating children with ASD could be discriminated from TD children. This suggested CBF lateralization in temporal lobes measured with DCS might serve as a discriminative feature for ASD.