A multi-frequency approach of the altered functional connectome for autism spectrum disorder identification

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder stands as a multifaceted and heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition. The utilization of functional magnetic resonance imaging to construct functional brain networks proves instrumental in comprehending the intricate interplay between brain activity and autism spectrum disorder, thereby elucidating the underlying pathogenesis at the cerebral level. Traditional functional brain networks, however, typically confine their examination to connectivity effects within a specific frequency band, disregarding potential connections among brain areas that span different frequency bands. To harness the full potential of interregional connections across diverse frequency bands within the brain, our study endeavors to develop a novel multi-frequency analysis method for constructing a comprehensive functional brain networks that incorporates multiple frequencies. Specifically, our approach involves the initial decomposition of functional magnetic resonance imaging into distinct frequency bands through wavelet transform. Subsequently, Pearson correlation is employed to generate corresponding functional brain networks and kernel for each frequency band. Finally, the classification was performed by a multi-kernel support vector machine, to preserve the connectivity effects within each band and the connectivity patterns shared among the different bands. Our proposed multi-frequency functional brain networks method yielded notable results, achieving an accuracy of 89.1%, a sensitivity of 86.67%, and an area under the curve of 0.942 in a publicly available autism spectrum disorder dataset.