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Artificial Intelligence for Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

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Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a chronic and extremely heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder, difficult to diagnose and with a still unclear multifactorial etiology. Given the scarce knowledge on this condition the research cannot be hypothesis-driven and must range across various sub-fields of biology and medicine, analyzing the big data produced by last generation healthcare and smart technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) can represent a valuable tool in this context, thanks to its ability to automatically discover complex patterns in high-dimensional data. This work represents a guide to the use of AI for research on ASD, describing various possible applications, which can differ for their objective (improving diagnosis, ranking severity, defining subtypes of ASD, drug discovery, etc.) and field (genetics, structural and functional neuroimaging, etc.). For each application, the nature of the data and the most appropriate AI techniques to analyze them are described, along with illustrative examples of successful studies. The guide also includes a discussion on the major challenges currently affecting AI-based research on ASD: the lack of data and the subsequent problems of overfitting and confounding effects. Finally promising future research avenues, such as the adoption of explainable AI and ensemble learning are outlined.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy

    Elisa Ferrari

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  1. Elisa Ferrari
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Correspondence to Elisa Ferrari .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Niklas Lidströmer

  2. Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Hutan Ashrafian

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Ferrari, E. (2021). Artificial Intelligence for Autism Spectrum Disorders. In: Lidströmer, N., Ashrafian, H. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58080-3_249-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58080-3_249-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58080-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58080-3

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