Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an intricate neuropsychiatric brain disorder characterized by social deficits and repetitive behaviors. Associated ASD biomarkers can be supportive of apprehending the underlying roots of the disease and lead the targeted diagnosis as well as treatment. Although deep learning approaches have been applied in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based clinical or behavioral identification of ASD, most erstwhile models are inadequate in their capacity to exploit the data richness. Classification techniques often solely rely on region-based summary and/or functional connectivity analysis of one pipeline or unique site dataset. Besides these, biomedical data modeling to analyze big data related to ASD is still perplexing due to its complexity and heterogeneity. Single volume image consideration has not been previously investigated in classification purposes. By deeming these challenges, in this work, firstly, we design an image generator to generate single volume brain images from the whole-brain image of each subject. Secondly, the single volume images are analyzed by evaluating four deep learning approaches comprising one amended volume base Convolutional Neural Network framework to classify ASD and typical control participants. Thirdly, we propose a novel deep ensemble learning classifier using VGG16 as feature extractor to ensure further classification performance. Then, to evaluate the classifier performance across the inter sites, we apply the proposed method on each site individually and validate our findings by comparing literature reports. We showcase our approaches on large-scale multi-site brain imaging dataset (ABIDE) by considering four preprocessing pipelines, and the outcome demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance compared with the literature findings; hence, which are robust and consistent.