Single-participant structural connectivity matrices lead to greater accuracy in classification of participants than function in autism in MRI
This work addresses the challenge of improving autism diagnosis accuracy using MRI data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing connectivity and machine learning approaches.
The researchers tackled the problem of classifying autism from MRI data by introducing a method to derive structural connectivity matrices from grey-matter volume histograms, achieving an AUROC of 0.7298 (69.71% accuracy) for structural connectivity, which outperformed functional connectivity and univariate grey matter volumes.
In this work, we introduce a technique of deriving symmetric connectivity matrices from regional histograms of grey-matter volume estimated from T1-weighted MRIs. We then validated the technique by inputting the connectivity matrices into a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify between participants with autism and age-, motion-, and intracranial-volume-matched controls from six different databases (29,288 total connectomes, mean age = 30.72, range 0.42-78.00, including 1555 subjects with autism). We compared this method to similar classifications of the same participants using fMRI connectivity matrices as well as univariate estimates of grey-matter volumes. We further applied graph-theoretical metrics on output class activation maps to identify areas of the matrices that the CNN preferentially used to make the classification, focusing particularly on hubs. Our results gave AUROCs of 0.7298 (69.71% accuracy) when classifying by only structural connectivity, 0.6964 (67.72% accuracy) when classifying by only functional connectivity, and 0.7037 (66.43% accuracy) when classifying by univariate grey matter volumes. Combining structural and functional connectivities gave an AUROC of 0.7354 (69.40% accuracy). Graph analysis of class activation maps revealed no distinguishable network patterns for functional inputs, but did reveal localized differences between groups in bilateral Heschl's gyrus and upper vermis for structural connectivity. This work provides a simple means of feature extraction for inputting large numbers of structural MRIs into machine learning models.