AI Predicts Autism From Infant Brain Scans


Guido Gerig, chair and professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, was involved in this research.

Twenty-two years ago, researchers first reported that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder had increased brain volume. During the intervening years, studies of younger and younger children showed that this brain “overgrowth” occurs in childhood.

Now, a team at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has detected brain growth changes linked to autism in children as young as 6 months old. And it piqued our interest because a deep-learning algorithm was able to use that data to predict whether a child at high-risk of autism would be diagnosed with the disorder at 24 months.

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