Lung airway geometry as an early predictor of autism: A preliminary machine learning-based study
This addresses the problem of early ASD diagnosis for children, but it is preliminary and incremental as it builds on existing biomarker research with a novel anatomical focus.
The study investigated whether lung airway geometry could serve as a biomarker for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by analyzing chest CT images from 54 children, achieving a peak cross-validation accuracy of nearly 89% with 94% sensitivity and 78% specificity using PCA and SVM on airway branching angles.
The goal of this study is to assess the feasibility of airway geometry as a biomarker for ASD. Chest CT images of children with a documented diagnosis of ASD as well as healthy controls were identified retrospectively. 54 scans were obtained for analysis, including 31 ASD cases and 23 age and sex-matched controls. A feature selection and classification procedure using principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machine (SVM) achieved a peak cross validation accuracy of nearly 89% using a feature set of 8 airway branching angles. Sensitivity was 94%, but specificity was only 78%. The results suggest a measurable difference in airway branchpoint angles between children with ASD and the control population. Under review at Scientific Reports