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EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

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

#41

Post by bjourne »

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…

Most believe that there is a common source for varying diagnoses like ADD, ADHD and high functioning Autism. What that source is, is not yet known but people have hypothesized about certain genes causing it, or changes in the prenatal environment.

The disorder is much more prevalent in some families than others and even in some ethnic groups which strongly suggests that there are genes involved. One theory suggests that the genetic material came from when Homo Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals.

Autism is in some ways very similar to homosexuality. There is no one true test for it, but if you "look for the signs" you can "diagnose" even very young children. It implies that autism, like homosexuality, can't be cured. People with the disorder have to live with it and those around them have to adapt because they can't change themselves.

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

#42

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 5 % is quite a lot of misdiagnosed babies if this is implemented as a mass screening activity

No, because “screening” and “diagnosis” aren't the same thing.

It might be a lot of children identified for diagnostic follow-up that isn't strictly necessary, though, but that may not outweigh the early support and assistance for those who end up being correctly diagnosed earlier because of the screening.

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

#43

Post by DINKDINK »

Relevant stats:

>The algorithms predicted a clinical diagnosis of ASD with high specificity, sensitivity and positive predictive value, exceeding 95 percent at some ages.

More about the metrics you care about[1]

Edit: Many people in this thread are talking about bayesian stats that it appears they don't full appreciate or understand. They're saying that 95% statistical accuracy is commendable. 95% sensitivity and 95% specificity aren't good enough to use in broad tests. Why? Autism has a 1/68 likely hood[2]. Meaning if you had a sample of 100 general-population people, tested them with this test, the likely hood of someone who tests positive for the test is actually positive (positive predictive value) is a measly ~20% (that is Probability that you have the condition given you test positive). Play around with these more at the following app: https://kennis-research.shinyapps.io/Bayes-App/

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity [2]https://www.autism-society.org/what-is/facts-and-statistics/

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

#44

Post by DINKDINK »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #40
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_beh…

>95% accuracy is outstanding

95% specificity and 95% sensitivity isn't good enough to test the general population. See why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16981888

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

#45

Post by 205guy »

wanderfowl wrote: post #36
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 o…

In the other comment thread that got shadow-banned, someone pointed out that there are several vaccinations recommended by 2 months of age [1]. I remember my child getting the first one before leaving the hospital (HepB [2]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979836 [2] https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/immunization-chart.html

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

#46

Post by StavrosK »

fundamental wrote: post #39
nonbel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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…

You have to account for the fact that you used so many algorithms, though. Using ten different algorithm makes it ten times more likely you'll fit your dataset well just by chance.

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

#47

Post by fundamental »

StavrosK wrote: post #46
fundamental wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have to account for the fact that you used so many algorithms, though. Using ten different algorithm makes it ten times more likely you'll fit your dataset well just by chance.

I acknowledge that the reported accuracy of a system will be higher if you take the max accuracy of 10 methods which have the same 'true' accuracy +- some noise. The results presented in table 5 of the paper are very unlikely in my opinion (as someone currently in the ML field and who has worked in the field of computational neuroscience) to be solely due to randomly trying different ML techniques without the underlying data providing a noteworthy difference between the target classes.

If these results are replicated independently with a different dataset then the magnitude of the overselling of the method will be seen. I just don't think that it makes sense to doubt the results (i.e. with a grid of EEG sensors and bandpower features it is possible to identify a portion of autism cases) based upon this factor alone.

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

#48

Post by fundamental »

DINKDINK wrote: post #43

Relevant stats: >The algorithms predicted a clinical diagnosis of ASD with high specificity, sensitivity and positive predictive value, exceeding 95 percent at some ages. More about the metrics you care about[1] Edit: Many people in this thread are talking about bayesian stats that it appears they don't full appreciate or understand. They're saying that 95% statistical accuracy is commendable. 95% sensitivity and 95%…

Thanks for writing this summary. Plenty of people get the wrong idea when it comes to test accuracy for topics like health diagnosis.

In the case of this particular topic it does seem like the outlined test could be another tool that doctors could utilize. If for instance a child has shown a change in developmental milestones then that observation comes with it's own (somewhat doctor specific) sensitivity and specificity. That information could be combined with the EEG test to improve the overall doctor+test accuracy. Nothing's going to be perfect, but the outlook is a bit more positive than presented in your example.

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

#49

Post by jiggunjer »

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 do you mean a false positive won't be detectable until a few years? I think by age 1 a parent will notice? Lack of eye contact, altered walking mechanism (foot dragging, tiptoes), non-responsiveness to voices, etc. So maybe a positive test means the kid gets more attention for a few months, that never hurt, right?

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

#50

Post by nonbel »

fundamental wrote: post #47
StavrosK wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to account for the fact that you used so many algorithms, though. Using ten different algorithm makes it ten times more likely you'll fit your dataset well just by chance.

I acknowledge that the reported accuracy of a system will be higher if you take the max accuracy of 10 methods which have the same 'true' accuracy +- some noise. The results presented in table 5 of the paper are very unlikely in my opinion (as someone currently in the ML field and who has worked in the field of computational neuroscience) to be solely due to randomly trying different ML techniques without the underly…

>"The results presented in table 5 of the paper are very unlikely... to be solely due to randomly trying different ML techniques"

This is a strawman, noone argues that their methods picked up on some correlations.

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