EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age • Hacker News Board

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#31

Post by cbhl » Wed, May 02, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #27

DanBC wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems to me that if there are no overlapping symptoms, The full name is "Autistic Spectrum Disorder", so the name hints that there's a range of stuff happening. To be autistic someone has to have problems with social communication, problems making or maintaining friendships, and fixed and repetitive interests. Some people also have other stuff on top. These things are common with autism, but are not needed for the…

And it overlaps with the diagnostic "Pervasive Developmental Disorder" in case you thought ASD wasn't a big enough tent.

In the DSM 5, "Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Sepcified" (PDD-NOS) and others (Asperger Syndrome) got refactored into a single unified Autism definition.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#32

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, May 02, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #28

projectramo wrote: post #16

This would be amazing if it works. The reason I say "if" and hedge my words is because the conventional wisdom is that autism is not a single disorder with a single underlying condition. It is a cluster of symptoms of varying intensity and it is (likely) caused by a host of underlying conditions. Two children diagnosed with the disorder can have no overlapping symptoms. If that is right, then the first step is to bre…

I suspect the reason autism has such a constellation of symptoms isnot because the cause is complex, but because the environment (human brain and body) is complex. Imagine there was "cardboard box spectrum disorder", caused by keeping a child in a 4x4-ft box for their first 5 years. They'd develop a host of comorbid symptoms, in varying intensities, based on how the child developed coping mechanisms and workarounds t…

Case in point: girls and boys are diagnosed with autism at wildly different rates. But how much of this is due to actual differences in the incidence of autism versus the differences in the way girls and boys are socialized resulting in different appearances of symptoms?

This is true of many behavioral and cognitive conditions. The symptoms and severity of things like schizophrenia vary significantly from culture to culture (in some cultures schizophrenics hear benign or even kind voices versus here in the western world where the voices tend to be harsh and violent).

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#33

Post by scardine » Wed, May 02, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

monochromatic wrote: post #29

Does early diagnosis give better treatment options?

Yes! The most effective treatment is behavioral therapy and the results are better if started early. At young age the brain is very plastic and for light cases you can teach all the things that are innate to neurotypical kids.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#34

Post by wanderfowl » Wed, May 02, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

burfog wrote: post #20

talltimtom wrote: post #15

In this weird world that we live in this might actually help prevent a load of other deciders through increasing vaccination.

That in turn causes other trouble. People adjust for perceived risk. For example, seatbelts and airbags make people less careful when driving. Vaccination makes people less careful about disease. There is no vaccine for enterovirus-68, which sometimes paralyses people. There is no vaccine for adenovirus-36, which is a cause of obesity. I could go on for a long time I think; lots of "harmless" viruses are turning out…

I'm having a [Poe's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) moment here. You've just applied Abstinence Only Sex Education 'logic' to infectious disease. This is either brilliant satire of the odd arguments against harm reduction in general, or... you're serious, and I agree, it's a crying shame nobody taught all those poor smallpox victims how to modify their behavior.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#35

Post by nonbel » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

fundamental wrote: post #5

neurotech1 wrote: post #3

EEG in 3mo infants is "poorly organized" even compared to 24mo child, so it I would take this one with a grain of salt.

I was taking this with a hefty grain of salt, though at least on first pass they seem to have a reasonable cross-validation/testing procedure (which is usually one of my major complaints with comp-neurosci papers). As per 3 month infants, you can see that their classifier does have difficulties at that age bracket, though performance seems to start to saturate around 6 months (table 5). It would be interesting to giv…

>"at least on first pass they seem to have a reasonable cross-validation/testing procedure (which is usually one of my major complaints with comp-neurosci papers)."

It looks like the usual overfitting the cv to me... They had 1000 features, 200 datapoints, tried out "several different algorithms".

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#36

Post by wanderfowl » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

talltimtom wrote: post #15

In this weird world that we live in this might actually help prevent a load of other deciders through increasing vaccination.

Agreed. That was my first thought, too. Part of the reason that these silly vaccine/autism conspiracy theories are hard to shut down is the fact that Autism is harder to detect pre-vaccination, so there's confirmation bias here among parents of Autistic children.

If this study provides nice evidence to the Anti-Vax crowd that Autism can be measured and detected well before vaccination age, this might help take some of the wind out of the sails of the movement.

Of course, for many, science won't help, much like usable retroreflectors will only break down the fantasy for a subset of moon landing conspiracy theorists, but if it gets brought up even once in a Whole Foods somewhere, they've done a good thing.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#37

Post by kpil » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

5 % is quite a lot of misdiagnosed babies if this is implemented as a mass screening activity, 2-3 times higher than than what the internet seems to think is the actual ASD incidence, and I imagine that that number includes a lot of "highly functional" ASD cases

What should a parent do when this happens? It will be only perhaps 20-30% risk that the baby actually do have ASD and not just a false positive.

I imagine that ASD "prevention" is mostly behavioural training [I have no idea at all actually] - but how much time and effort would that take? What are the consequences for healthy babies? I imagine that most people would spend a lot of effort on anything that could help in cases like this.

It's a bit problematic since it's not possible to know until after a couple of years if it's was a false positive or not. It might turn out that a lot (or most) of all successful recoveries was in fact "false positives".

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#38

Post by terminado » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:35 PM UTC

talltimtom wrote: post #15

In this weird world that we live in this might actually help prevent a load of other deciders through increasing vaccination.

Well, first, you have to believe that the EEG's predictor model is accurate and trustworthy.

You have to trust those prescribing it, which, if you don't trust the advice of a doctor with a needle, would you trust them with a brain scan that labels your child defective, before they can even talk?

Some people (those who might consider skipping vaccinations) might avoid such an exam entirely, and choose to wait until their child is age 10 or 15, to decide whether they have some sort of problem with their social skills, or worse.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#39

Post by fundamental » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:40 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #35

fundamental wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taking this with a hefty grain of salt, though at least on first pass they seem to have a reasonable cross-validation/testing procedure (which is usually one of my major complaints with comp-neurosci papers). As per 3 month infants, you can see that their classifier does have difficulties at that age bracket, though performance seems to start to saturate around 6 months (table 5). It would be interesting to giv…

>"at least on first pass they seem to have a reasonable cross-validation/testing procedure (which is usually one of my major complaints with comp-neurosci papers)." It looks like the usual overfitting the cv to me... They had 1000 features, 200 datapoints, tried out "several different algorithms".

That doesn't really diminish the results in my book. If you're trying to publish something it's basically assumed that you're going to try out several methods and show the one with better performance even if the performance difference is not statistically different.

As per the number of features and data points: In this field you generally don't have a ton of subjects to sample from and the high dimensional features are a natural result of the array based recordings. It should be possible to perform dimensional reduction on the data, however the ML methods are already implicitly doing that step so it's not necessarily that important.

My normal gripe is when the tested subjects have some data in the training fold and some data in the testing fold (even if the data points are separate). In those cases then the ML method can fit the statistics of a particular subject rather than the true target class (e.g. target movement of a cursor in a BCI). In this paper they explicitly are testing on a subject which was never trained. So, even though the data + particular supervised layer is going to budge the results around some, it should not be a night and day difference from what's expected in reality.

Re: EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

#40

Post by alexandercrohde » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:40 PM UTC

kpil wrote: post #37

5 % is quite a lot of misdiagnosed babies if this is implemented as a mass screening activity, 2-3 times higher than than what the internet seems to think is the actual ASD incidence, and I imagine that that number includes a lot of "highly functional" ASD cases What should a parent do when this happens? It will be only perhaps 20-30% risk that the baby actually do have ASD and not just a false positive. I imagine th…

What? 95% accuracy is outstanding. I see that you're saying if you said "No" for all babies, that'd be 95%, so that's a legitimate point.

However, it sounds like it's better than that "We were also able to predict ASD severity, as indicated by the ADOS Calibrated Severity Score, with quite high reliability, also by 9 months of age."

I imagine the intervention is ABA therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Effi...) or similar, which is costly, but otherwise not a risk.