Predicting the Symptom Severity in Autism Spectrum Disorder Based on EEG Metrics

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with the impaired integrating and segregating of related information that is expanded within the large-scale brain network. The varying ASD symptom severities have been explored, relying on their behaviors and related brain activity, but how to effectively predict ASD symptom severity needs further exploration. In this study, we aim to investigate whether the ASD symptom severity could be predicted with electroencephalography (EEG) metrics. Based on a publicly available dataset, the EEG brain networks were constructed, and four types of EEG metrics were calculated. Then, we statistically compared the brain network differences among ASD children with varying severities, i.e., high/low autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) scores, as well as with the typically developing (TD) children. Thereafter, the EEG metrics were utilized to validate whether they could facilitate the prediction of the ASD symptom severity. The results demonstrated that both high- and low-scoring ASD children showed the decreased long-range frontal-occipital connectivity, increased anterior frontal connectivity and altered network properties. Furthermore, we found that the four types of EEG metrics are significantly correlated with the ADOS scores, and their combination can serve as the features to effectively predict the ASD symptom severity. The current findings will expand our knowledge of network dysfunction in ASD children and provide new EEG metrics for predicting the symptom severity.