scholarly journals Cerebellar volume in autism: Meta-analysis and analysis of the ABIDE cohort

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Traut ◽  
Anita Beggiato ◽  
Thomas Bourgeron ◽  
Richard Delorme ◽  
Laure Rondi-Reig ◽  
...  

AbstractCerebellar volume abnormalities have been often suggested as a possible endophenotype for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We aimed at objectifying this possible alteration by performing a systematic meta-analysis of the literature, and an analysis of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) cohort. Our meta-analysis sought to determine a combined effect size of ASD diagnosis on different measures of the cerebellar anatomy, as well as the effect of possible factors of variability across studies. We then analysed the cerebellar volume of 328 patients and 353 controls from the ABIDE project. The meta-analysis of the literature suggested a weak but significant association between ASD diagnosis and increased cerebellar volume (p=0.049, uncorrected), but the analysis of ABIDE did not show any relationship. The studies in the literature were generally underpowered, however, the number of statistically significant findings was larger than expected. Although we could not provide a conclusive explanation for this excess of significant findings, our analyses would suggest publication bias as a possible reason. Finally, age, sex and IQ were important sources of cerebellar volume variability, however, independent of autism diagnosis.

2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (7) ◽  
pp. 579-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Traut ◽  
Anita Beggiato ◽  
Thomas Bourgeron ◽  
Richard Delorme ◽  
Laure Rondi-Reig ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima zahra Benabdallah ◽  
Ahmed Drissi El Maliani ◽  
Dounia Lotfi ◽  
Rachid Jennane ◽  
Mohammed El hassouni

Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is theoretically characterized by alterations in functional connectivity between brain regions. Many works presented approaches to determine informative patterns that help to predict autism from typical development. However, most of the proposed pipelines are not specifically designed for the autism problem, i.e they do not corroborate with autism theories about functional connectivity. In this paper, we propose a framework that takes into account the properties of local connectivity and long range under-connectivity in the autistic brain. The originality of the proposed approach is to adopt elimination as a technique in order to well emerge the autistic brain connectivity alterations, and show how they contribute to differentiate ASD from controls. Experimental results conducted on the large multi-site Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) show that our approach provides accurate prediction up to 70% and succeeds to prove the existence of deficits in the long-range connectivity in the ASD subjects brains.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavithra Elumalai ◽  
Yasharth Yadav ◽  
Nitin Williams ◽  
Emil Saucan ◽  
Jürgen Jost ◽  
...  

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a set of neurodevelopmental disorders that pose a significant global health burden. Measures from graph theory have been used to characterise ASD-related changes in resting-state fMRI functional connectivity networks (FCNs), but recently developed geometry-inspired measures have not been applied so far. In this study, we applied geometry-inspired graph Ricci curvatures to investigate ASD-related changes in resting-state fMRI FCNs. To do this, we applied Forman-Ricci and Ollivier-Ricci curvatures to compare networks of ASD and healthy controls (N = 1112) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE-I) dataset. We performed these comparisons at the brain-wide level as well as at the level of individual brain regions, and further, determined the behavioral relevance of region-specific differences with Neurosynth meta-analysis decoding. We found brain-wide ASD-related differences for both Forman-Ricci and Ollivier-Ricci curvatures. For Forman-Ricci curvature, these differences were distributed across 83 of the 200 brain regions studied, and concentrated within the Default Mode, Somatomotor and Ventral Attention Network. Meta-analysis decoding identified the brain regions showing curvature differences as involved in social cognition, memory, language and movement. Notably, comparison with results from previous non-invasive stimulation (TMS/tDCS) experiments revealed that the set of brain regions showing curvature differences overlapped with the set of brain regions whose stimulation resulted in positive cognitive or behavioural outcomes in ASD patients. These results underscore the utility of geometry-inspired graph Ricci curvatures in characterising disease-related changes in ASD, and possibly, other neurodevelopmental disorders.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Di ◽  
Bharat B Biswal

Background: Males are more likely to suffer from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than females. As to whether females with ASD have similar brain alterations remain an open question. The current study aimed to examine sex-dependent as well as sex-independent alterations in resting-state functional connectivity in individuals with ASD compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. Method: Resting-state functional MRI data were acquired from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). Subjects between 6 to 20 years of age were included for analysis. After matching the intelligence quotient between groups for each dataset, and removing subjects due to excessive head motion, the resulting effective sample contained 28 females with ASD, 49 TD females, 129 males with ASD, and 141 TD males, with a two (diagnosis) by two (sex) design. Functional connectivity among 153 regions of interest (ROIs) comprising the whole brain was computed. Two by two analysis of variance was used to identify connectivity that showed diagnosis by sex interaction or main effects of diagnosis. Results: The main effects of diagnosis were found mainly between visual cortex and other brain regions, indicating sex-independent connectivity alterations. We also observed two connections whose connectivity showed diagnosis by sex interaction between the precuneus and medial cerebellum as well as the precunes and dorsal frontal cortex. While males with ASD showed higher connectivity in these connections compared with TD males, females with ASD had lower connectivity than their counterparts. Conclusions: Both sex-dependent and sex-independent functional connectivity alterations are present in ASD.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn MR Lake ◽  
Emily S Finn ◽  
Stephanie M Noble ◽  
Tamara Vanderwal ◽  
Xilin Shen ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with multiple complex abnormalities in functional brain connectivity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Despite much research in this area, to date, neuroimaging-based models are not able to characterize individuals with ASD with sufficient sensitivity and specificity; this is likely due to the heterogeneity and complexity of this disorder. Here we apply a data-driven subject-level approach, connectome-based predictive modeling, to resting-state fMRI data from a set of individuals from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange. Using leave-one-subject-out and split-half analyses, we define two functional connectivity networks that predict continuous scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and confirm that these networks generalize to novel subjects. Notably, these networks were found to share minimal anatomical overlap. Further, our results generalize to individuals for whom SRS/ADOS scores are unavailable, predicting worse scores for ASD than typically developing individuals. In addition, predicted SRS scores for individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from the ADHD-200 Consortium are linked to ADHD symptoms, supporting the hypothesis that the functional brain organization changes relevant to ASD severity share a component associated with attention. Finally, we explore the membership of predictive connections within conventional (atlas-based) functional networks. In summary, our results suggest that an individual’s functional connectivity profile contains information that supports dimensional, non-binary classification in ASD, aligning with the goals of precision medicine and individual-level diagnosis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yafeng Zhan ◽  
Jianze Wei ◽  
Jian Liang ◽  
Xiu Xu ◽  
Ran He ◽  
...  

AbstractPsychiatric disorders often exhibit shared (co-morbid) symptoms, raising controversies over accurate diagnosis and the overlap of their neural underpinnings. Because the complexity of data generated by clinical studies poses a formidable challenge, we have pursued a reductionist framework using brain imaging data of a transgenic primate model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we report an interpretable cross-species machine learning approach which extracts transgene-related core regions in the monkey brain to construct the classifier for diagnostic classification in humans. The cross-species classifier based on core regions, mainly distributed in frontal and temporal cortex, identified from the transgenic primate model, achieved an accuracy of 82.14% in one clinical ASD cohort obtained from Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE-I), significantly higher than the human-based classifier (61.31%, p < 0.001), which was validated in another independent ASD cohort obtained from ABIDE-II. Such monkey-based classifier generalized to achieve a better classification in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) cohorts, and enabled parsing of differential connections to right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex being attributable to distinct traits in patients with ASD and OCD. These findings underscore the importance of investigating biologically homogeneous samples, particularly in the absence of real-world data adequate for deconstructing heterogeneity inherited in the clinical cohorts.One Sentence SummaryFeatures learned from transgenic monkeys enable improved diagnosis of autism-related disorders and dissection of their underlying circuits.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Fouquet ◽  
Nicolas Traut ◽  
Anita Beggiato ◽  
Richard Delorme ◽  
Thomas Bourgeron ◽  
...  

AbstractThe contrast of the interface between the neocortical grey matter and the white matter is emerging as an important neuroimaging phenotype for several brain disorders. To date, a single in vivo study has analysed the cortical grey-to-white matter percent contrast (GWPC) on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and has shown a significant decrease of this contrast in several areas in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Our goal was to replicate this study across a larger cohort, using the multicenter data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange 1 and 2 gathering data from 2,148 subjects. Multiple linear regression was used to study the effect of the diagnosis of ASD on the GWPC. Contrary to the first study, we found a statistically significant increase of GWPC among individuals with ASD in left auditory and bilateral visual sensory areas, as well as in the left primary motor cortex. These results were still statistically significant after inclusion of cortical thickness as covariate. There are numerous reports of sensory-motor atypicalities in patients with ASD, which may be the reason for the differences in GWPC that we observed. Further investigation could help us determine the potential role of a defect or a delay in intra-cortical myelination of sensory-motor regions in ASD. Code: https://github.com/neuroanatomy/GWPC.


Author(s):  
April Haas ◽  
Kimberly J. Vannest ◽  
Marcus C. Fuller ◽  
Jennifer B. Ganz

A deficit in social skills often makes teaching academics a second thought when instructing students with autism. Peer-mediated instruction has been well studied for increasing academic skills across various disabilities and social skills for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The purpose of this study was to determine the effect size of peer-mediated academic instruction (PMAI) to increase academic skills for students with ASD. Results indicate studies demonstrate a weak to moderate effect when using PMAI to teach students with ASD. These results validate PMAI can be effective when teaching academic skills to students with ASD; however, more studies are needed to better understand for whom and under what conditions PMAI is most effective.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document