Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a deficit of social relationships, interaction, sense of imagination, and constrained interests. Early diagnosis of ASD will aid in devising appropriate training procedures and placing those children in the normal stream. The objective of this research is to analyze the brain response for auditory/visual stimuli in Typically Developing (TD) and children with autism through electroencephalography (EEG). Brain dynamics in the EEG signal can be analyzed well with the help of nonlinear feature primitives. Recent research reveals that, application of fractal-based techniques proves to be effective to estimate of degree of nonlinearity in a signal. This research attempts to analyze the effect of brain dynamics with Higuchi Fractal Dimension (HFD). Also, the performance of the fractal based techniques depends on the selection of proper hyper-parameters involved in it. One of the key parameters involved in computation of HFD is the time interval parameter ‘k’. Most of the researches arbitrarily fixes the value of ‘k’ in the range of all channels. This research proposes an algorithm to estimate the optimal value of the time parameter for each channel. Sub-band analysis was also carried out for the responding channels. Statistical analysis on the experimental reveals that a difference of 30% was observed between autistic and Typically Developing children.
Funding source: Science for Equity, Empowerment and Development Division
Award Identifier / Grant number: SEED/TIDE/092/2016
Acknowledgments
The datasets were obtained from Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, India. This research was supported by Department of Science and Technology, India (Ref no: SEED/TIDE/092/2016) for their financial support.
Research funding: This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, India (Ref no: SEED/TIDE/092/2016).
Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest concerning the contents of this article.
Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.
Ethical approval: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments, or comparable ethical standards.
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