Retinal Photographs Viable for Autism Spectrum Disorder Screening

THURSDAY, Dec. 21, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Retinal photographs may be viable for screening of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to a study published online Dec. 15 in JAMA Network Open.

Jae Han Kim, from the Yonsei University Health System in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues conducted a diagnostic study at a single-tertiary care hospital to develop deep ensemble models to differentiate between retinal photographs of individuals with ASD and age- and sex-matched individuals with typical development (TD). Using the pretrained ResNeXt-50 (32×4d) network, deep ensembles of five models were built with 10-fold cross validation. A total of 1,890 eyes from 958 participants were included in the study; 479 participants were evaluated in the ASD group and 479 in the TD group (945 eyes).

The researchers found that the models had a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), sensitivity, and specificity of 1.00 on the test set for ASD screening. Using only 10 percent of the image containing the optic disc, these models retained a mean AUROC of 1.00. The models had a mean AUROC of 0.74 for symptom severity screening and had sensitivity and specificity of 0.58 and 0.74, respectively, on the test set.

"Although future studies are required to establish generalizability, our study represents a notable step toward developing objective screening tools for ASD, which may help address urgent issues such as the inaccessibility of specialized child psychiatry assessments due to limited resources," the authors write.

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