Prediction of Individual Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) scores based on neural responses during live eye-to-eye contact

Social difficulties are impactful in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and
links between these difficulties and underlying neural processes are
active research questions. We present a multivariate classification method
for neural data acquired from 36 participants during a live eye-to-eye
contact task. Participants were either typically developed (TD) or
diagnosed as ASD through gold-standard Autism Diagnostic Observation
Schedule (ADOS) evaluation. We hypothesized multivariate classification
could discriminate TD vs. ASD based on neural responses. Support vector
machine (SVM) classification was able to discriminate between groups
during the eye-contact interaction. In addition, it was found that
underlying neural patterns contributing to binary classification also
predicted measured ADOS scores with high correlation even though ADOS
scores were not used for training. The correlation between observed and
predicted ADOS scores was 0.72 (p < 0.002) for eye-to-eye contact.
These findings suggest neural responses to live eye-to-eye contact are
predictive of social symptomatology in ASD.