Computer vision analysis captures atypical attention in toddlers with autism

Abstract

To demonstrate the capability of computer vision analysis to detect atypical orienting and attention behaviors in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder. One hundered and four toddlers of 16-31 months old (mean = 22) participated in this study. Twenty-two of the toddlers had autism spectrum disorder and 82 had typical development or developmental delay. Toddlers watched video stimuli on a tablet while the built-in camera recorded their head movement. Computer vision analysis measured participants' attention and orienting in response to name calls. Reliability of the computer vision analysis algorithm was tested against a human rater. Differences in behavior were analyzed between the autism spectrum disorder group and the comparison group. Reliability between computer vision analysis and human coding for orienting to name was excellent (intra-class coefficient 0.84, 95% confidence interval 0.67-0.91). Only 8% of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder oriented to name calling on >1 trial, compared to 63% of toddlers in the comparison group (p = 0.002). Mean latency to orient was significantly longer for toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (2.02 vs 1.06 s, p = 0.04). Sensitivity for autism spectrum disorder of atypical orienting was 96% and specificity was 38%. Older toddlers with autism spectrum disorder showed less attention to the videos overall (p = 0.03). Automated coding offers a reliable, quantitative method for detecting atypical social orienting and reduced sustained attention in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

Automated Affect Detection in Deep Brain Stimulation for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

“…Automated emotion recognition from facial expression is an active area of research [26, 29]. In clinical contexts, investigators have detected occurrence of depression, autism, conflict, and PTSD from visual features (i.e., face and body expression or movement) [7, 10, 18, 22, 25, 27]. In the current pilot study, we explored the feasibility of detecting changes in affect in response to time-locked changes in neurophysiological challenge.…”

Retinal alterations in a pre-clinical model of an autism spectrum disorder

“…For example, ASD patients apparently perform better than usual in some visual tasks, and worse in others [19]. It has also been shown that certain types of visual stimulus, such as computer screen lights, capture the attention of individuals affected by ASD more than would be expected for neurotypical people [20]. Additionally, because the retina is part of the central nervous system (CNS), it uses mainly glutamate and GABA to transmit and modulate visual signals [21] and produces most, if not all, neurotransmitters found in the brain.…”

Computational Analysis of Deep Visual Data for Quantifying Facial Expression Production

“…Concerning the assessment of ASD behavioral cues, computer vision and machine learning techniques have been effectively exploited in the last years to highlight signs that are considered early features of ASD [12]. Computer vision analysis measured participants' attention and orienting in response to name calls in [13] whereas in [14] the head postural stability was evaluated while the children watched a series of dynamic movies involving different types of stimuli. Both works made use of an algorithm that detects and tracks 49 facial landmarks on the child's face and estimates head pose angles relative to the camera by computing the optimal rotation parameters between the detected landmarks and a 3D canonical face model.…”

“…In particular, from the last column, it is possible to derive that works in [19][20][21][22] did not consider any quantitative evaluation but just a qualitative analysis of the outcomes to highlight the differences in affective abilities of ASD vs. TD groups. [16] x x x expert clinician [15] x manual annotation [13] x x human rater [14] x ASD vs. TD [19] x ASD vs. TD [20] x ASD vs. TD [21] x ASD vs. TD [22] x ASD vs. TD [24] x diagnostic labels (ASD/non-ASD) [23] x x expert human raters (smiling/not smiling)) [8] x expert psychologists (only on ASD Group)…”