Relationship between abnormal intrinsic functional connectivity of subcortices and autism symptoms in high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder

This study explores subcortices and their intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) adults and investigates their relationship with clinical severity.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data were acquired from 74 ASD patients, and 63 gender and age-matched typically developing (TD) adults. Independent component analysis (ICA) was conducted to evaluate subcortical patterns of basal ganglia (BG) and thalamus. These two brain areas were treated as regions of interest to further calculate whole-brain FC. In addition, we employed multivariate machine learning to identify subcortices-based FC brain patterns and clinical scores to classify ASD adults from those TD subjects.

In ASD individuals, autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) was negatively correlated with the BG network. Similarly, social responsiveness scale (SRS) was negatively correlated with the thalamus network. The BG-based iFC analysis revealed adults with ASD versus TD had lower FC, and its FC with the right medial temporal lobe (MTL), was positively correlated with SRS and ADOS separately. ASD could be predicted with a balanced accuracy of around 60.0 % using brain patterns and 84.7 % using clinical variables.

Our results revealed the abnormal subcortical iFC may be related to autism symptoms.