Web-based autism screening using facial images and convolutional neural network

Abstract

Developmental disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affect a person’s ability to interact socially, and communicate effectively and also cause behavioral issues. Children with ASD cannot be cured but they might benefit from early intervention to enhance their cognitive abilities, favorite their growth , and affect their lives and families in a positive way. Multiple standard ASD screening tools are used such as the autism diagnostic observational schedule (ADOS) and the autism diagnostic interview (ADI), which are known to be lengthy and challenging without specialist training to administrate and score. The process of ASD assessment can be time-consuming and costly, and the growing number of autistic cases worldwide indicates an urgent need for a quick, simple, and dependable self-administered autism screening tool that may be used if a child displays some of the common signs of autism, and to ensure whether or not he should seek professional full ASD diagnosis. According to a number of studies, ASD individuals exhibit facial phenotypes that are distinct from those of normally developing children. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have mostly found utility in image classification applications due to their high classification accuracy. Using facial images, a dense convolutional network (Densenet) model, and cloud-based advantages, in this paper we proposed a practical, fast, and easy-to-use ASD online screening approach. Easily available through the internet via the link “https://asd-detector.herokuapp.com/”, our suggested web-based screening instrument may be a practical and trustworthy tool for practitioners in their ASD diagnostic procedures with a 98 percent testing dataset classification accuracy.