Reliably quantifying the severity of social symptoms in children with autism using ASDSpeech.

Several studies have demonstrated that the severity of social communication problems, a core symptom of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is correlated with specific speech characteristics of ASD individuals. This suggests that it may be possible to develop speech analysis algorithms that can quantify ASD symptom severity from speech recordings in a direct and objective manner. Here we demonstrate the utility of a new open-source AI algorithm, ASDSpeech, which can analyze speech recordings of ASD children and reliably quantify their social communication difficulties across multiple developmental timepoints.

Idiosyncratic pupil regulation in autistic children.

Recent neuroimaging and eye-tracking studies have suggested that children with autism exhibit more variable and idiosyncratic brain responses and eye movements than typically developing (TD) children. Here, we extended this research to pupillometry recordings. We successfully acquired pupillometry recordings from 111 children (74 with autism), 4.

Automated Analysis of Stereotypical Movements in Videos of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Importance: Stereotypical motor movements (SMMs) are a form of restricted and repetitive behavior, which is a core symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Current quantification of SMM severity is extremely limited, with studies relying on coarse and subjective caregiver reports or laborious manual annotation of short video recordings.

Objective: To assess the utility of a new open-source AI algorithm that can analyze extensive video recordings of children and automatically identify segments with heterogeneous SMMs, thereby enabling their direct and objective quantification.

Breastfeeding patterns in infants are associated with a later diagnosis of autism Spectrum disorder.

Breastfeeding is associated with medical and developmental benefits. This study aimed to assess associations between nutritional patterns in the first year of life and the likelihood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 270 children diagnosed with ASD (cases) and 500 neurotypical children (controls) matched to cases by sex, ethnicity, and birth date (± 3 months) were included in this retrospective case-control study.