Auto-ASD-Network: A technique based on Deep Learning and Support Vector Machines for diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorder using fMRI data

Quantitative analysis of brain disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an ongoing field of research. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have been playing an important role in automating the diagnosis of brain disorders by extracting discriminative features from the brain data. In this study, we propose a model called Auto-ASD-Network in order to classify subjects with Autism disorder from healthy subjects using only fMRI data. Our model consists of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with two hidden layers. We use an algorithm called SMOTE for performing data augmentation in order to generate artificial data and avoid overfitting, which helps increase the classification accuracy. We further investigate the discriminative power of features extracted using MLP by feeding them to an SVM classifier. In order to optimize the hyperparameters of SVM, we use a technique called Auto Tune Models (ATM) which searches over the hyperparameter space to find the best values of SVM hyperparameters. Our model achieves more than 70% classification accuracy for 4 fMRI datasets with the highest accuracy of 80%. It improves the performance of SVM by 26%, the stand-alone MLP by 16% and the state of the art method in ASD classification by 14%. The implemented code will be available as GPL license on GitHub portal of our lab (https://github.com/PCDS)