Identifying autism spectrum disorder using edge-centric functional connectivity.

Brain network analysis is an effective method to seek abnormalities in functional interactions for brain disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Traditional studies of brain networks focus on the node-centric functional connectivity (nFC), ignoring interactions of edges to miss much information that facilitates diagnostic decisions. In this study, we present a protocol based on an edge-centric functional connectivity (eFC) approach, which significantly improves classification performance by utilizing the co-fluctuations information between the edges of brain regions compared with nFC to build the classification mode for ASD using the multi-site dataset Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE I). Our model results show that even using the traditional machine-learning classifier support vector machine (SVM) on the challenging ABIDE I dataset, relatively high performance is achieved: 96.41% of accuracy, 98.30% of sensitivity, and 94.25% of specificity. These promising results suggest that the eFC can be used to build a reliable machine-learning framework to diagnose mental disorders such as ASD and promote identifications of stable and effective biomarkers. This study provides an essential complementary perspective for understanding the neural mechanisms of ASD and may facilitate future investigations on early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders.