ASD-GANNet: A Generative Adversarial Network-Inspired Deep Learning Approach for the Classification of Autism Brain Disorder

The classification of a pre-processed fMRI dataset using functional connectivity (FC)-based features is considered a challenging task because of the set of high-dimensional FC features and the small dataset size. To tackle this specific set of FC high-dimensional features and a small-sized dataset, we propose here a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN)-based dataset augmenter to first train the cGAN on computed connectivity features of NYU dataset and use the trained cGAN to generate synthetic connectivity features per category. After obtaining a sufficient number of connectivity features per category, a Multi-Head attention mechanism is used as a head for the classification. We name our proposed approach “ASD-GANNet”, which is end-to-end and does not require hand-crafted features, as the Multi-Head attention mechanism focuses on the features that are more relevant. Moreover, we compare our results with the six available state-of-the-art techniques from the literature. Our proposed approach results using the “NYU” site as a training set for generating a cGAN-based synthetic dataset are promising. We achieve an overall 10-fold cross-validation-based accuracy of 82%, sensitivity of 82%, and specificity of 81%, outperforming available state-of-the art approaches. A sitewise comparison of our proposed approach also outperforms the available state-of-the-art, as out of the 17 sites, our proposed approach has better results in the 10 sites.