Clinical Triage of Autism
In a triage method under development by Dennis Wall, director of the Computational Biology Initiative at Harvard Medical School, parents answer seven questions about their child’s behavior and submit a five-minute video taken during a playdate, birthday party or other everyday social situation. Three trained evaluators score each video for eight behaviors, including eye contact and imaginative play.
“I think it’s very important to be thinking about combining information from multiple sources, particularly not just relying on parental report but being able to validate that report in some way,” says Zachary Warren, assistant professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who is not involved in Wall’s efforts.
Wall argues that a video might even offer an advantage over existing gold-standard tools, in which clinicians observe the child in an office.
“A child in an artificial environment tends to do different things than the child does in his or her natural environment,” Wall says. “The natural setting can be very powerful for showing signs that can enable faster decision-making.”
To develop this system, Wall used an artificial intelligence approach called machine learning, which identified a subset of questions from the ADI-R and behaviors evaluated by the ADOS as being most crucial to producing an autism diagnosis.
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