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/
Given that diagnosing Autism is hard and that all previous attempts at diagnosing it in a non-psychological way have failed this would be an extremely surprising result.
Call me skeptical until it's reproduced independently.
EEG in 3mo infants is "poorly organized" even compared to 24mo child, so it I would take this one with a grain of salt.
Research paper in question: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24318-x
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 that ASD "prevention" is mostly behavioural training [I have no idea at all actually] - but how much time and effort would that take? What are the consequences for healthy babies? I imagine that most people would spend a lot of effort on anything that could help in cases like this.
It's a bit problematic since it's not possible to know until after a couple of years if it's was a false positive or not. It might turn out that a lot (or most) of all successful recoveries was in fact "false positives".
Wow that is insanly cool. Especially considering that we don't even know what ASD is, or what could be causing it.
Could this be used for a ASD scale?
There's some really early eye movement based detection too. Good to see this. As others point out it isn't a binary but a hugely variant spectrum, but there are some commonalities that at the very least suggest that a child receive further screening or prepare the parent to watch for other symptoms. Regardless of the type and spectrum position, a kid with an early diagnosis/warning seems much more likely to have a good outcome than one that gets one while in pre-school or kindergarten.
I don't understand why there's such a massive focus on autism research, both on HN and in the news in general. It doesn't seem like a pareto optimal use of attention resources.
Does early diagnosis give better treatment options?
In this weird world that we live in this might actually help prevent a load of other deciders through increasing vaccination.
"An experimenter blew bubbles to distract them." Wasn't expecting my daily does of cute in this Autism study's abstract, but got it anyway.
Not possible, that's before they've had most of their vaccinations.
/s
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 break it down into different kinds of conditions. (No eye contact is caused by X. Speech issues are caused by Y).
However, if this test can effectively pick apart one of the underlying conditions and its symptoms that would be a huge step forward. We could definitively say whether a child has this particular version of "autism".
After we tease apart a few more versions, the original condition will disappear and be subsumed by these other versions.