A hybrid CNN-SVM model for enhanced autism diagnosis

Autism is a representative disorder of pervasive developmental disorder. It exerts influence upon an individual’s behavior and performance, potentially co-occurring with other mental illnesses. Consequently, an effective diagnostic approach proves to be invaluable in both therapeutic interventions and the timely provision of medical support. Currently, most scholars’ research primarily relies on neuroimaging techniques for auxiliary diagnosis and does not take into account the distinctive features of autism’s social impediments. In order to address this deficiency, this paper introduces a novel convolutional neural network-support vector machine model that integrates resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data with the social responsiveness scale metrics for the diagnostic assessment of autism. We selected 821 subjects containing the social responsiveness scale measure from the publicly available Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange dataset, including 379 subjects with autism spectrum disorder and 442 typical controls. After preprocessing of fMRI data, we compute the static and dynamic functional connectivity for each subject. Subsequently, convolutional neural networks and attention mechanisms are utilized to extracts their respective features. The extracted features, combined with the social responsiveness scale features, are then employed as novel inputs for the support vector machine to categorize autistic patients and typical controls. The proposed model identifies salient features within the static and dynamic functional connectivity, offering a possible biological foundation for clinical diagnosis. By incorporating the behavioral assessments, the model achieves a remarkable classification accuracy of 94.30%, providing a more reliable support for auxiliary diagnosis.