Autism Spectrum Disorder Detection Using Prominent Connectivity Features from Electroencephalography

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder of brain growth with great variability whose clinical presentation initially shows up during early stages or youth, and ASD follows a repetitive pattern of behavior in most cases. Accurate diagnosis of ASD has been difficult in clinical practice as there is currently no valid indicator of ASD. Since ASD is regarded as a neurodevelopmental disorder, brain signals specially electroencephalography (EEG) are an effective method for detecting ASD. Therefore, this research aims at developing a method of extracting features from EEG signal for discriminating between ASD and control subjects. This study applies six prominent connectivity features, namely Cross Correlation (XCOR), Phase Locking Value (PLV), Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Mutual Information (MI), Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) and Transfer Entropy (TE), for feature extraction. The Connectivity Feature Maps (CFMs) are constructed and used for classification through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). As CFMs contain spatial information, they are able to distinguish ASD and control subjects better than other features. Rigorous experimentation has been performed on the EEG datasets collected from Italy and Saudi Arabia according to different criteria. MI feature shows the best result for categorizing ASD and control participants with increased sample size and segmentation.