Data-Driven Decision Support for Adult Autism Diagnosis Using Machine Learning

Adult referrals to specialist autism spectrum disorder diagnostic services have increased in recent years, placing strain on existing services and illustrating the need for the development of a reliable screening tool, in order to identify and prioritize patients most likely to receive an ASD diagno...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Digital 2022-06, Vol.2 (2), p.224-243
Main Authors: Batsakis, Sotirios, Adamou, Marios, Tachmazidis, Ilias, Jones, Sarah, Titarenko, Sofya, Antoniou, Grigoris, Kehagias, Thanasis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Autism
Behavior
Communication
Machine learning
Patients
Questionnaires
Validity
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Summary:Adult referrals to specialist autism spectrum disorder diagnostic services have increased in recent years, placing strain on existing services and illustrating the need for the development of a reliable screening tool, in order to identify and prioritize patients most likely to receive an ASD diagnosis. In this work a detailed overview of existing approaches is presented and a data driven analysis using machine learning is applied on a dataset of adult autism cases consisting of 192 cases. Our results show initial promise, achieving total positive rate (i.e., correctly classified instances to all instances ratio) up to 88.5%, but also point to limitations of currently available data, opening up avenues for further research. The main direction of this research is the development of a novel autism screening tool for adults (ASTA) also introduced in this work and preliminary results indicate the ASTA is suitable for use as a screening tool for adult populations in clinical settings.
ISSN:2673-6470
2673-6470
DOI:10.3390/digital2020014