News Finding: In sum, the study found entirely different neural substrates at initial clinical detection that precede and underlie later good versus poor language outcome in autism.
Paper Finding: Comparing these different classifiers based on area under the curve (AUC) values, we find that the multimodal combination of clinical intake measures plus left hemisphere superior temporal cortex activation outperformed all other classifiers (AUC = 81).
News Context: In contrast, ASD toddlers with poor language outcomes had superior temporal cortices that showed diminished or abnormal inactivity to speech. In sum, the study found entirely different neural substrates at initial clinical detection that precede and underlie later good versus poor language outcome in autism. These findings, said researchers, will open new avenues of progress towards identifying the causes and best treatment for these two very different types of autism.
Paper Context: In ASD Good, however, this atypical reversal was less severe when assessing the brain-outcome behavioral relationship, and this may be indicative of a different developmental process emerging in ASD Good that allows such brain-behavioral relationships to approach those seen in LD/DD. Comparing these different classifiers based on area under the curve (AUC) values, we find that the multimodal combination of clinical intake measures plus left hemisphere superior temporal cortex activation outperformed all other classifiers (AUC = 81). Classifiers that used either ADOS alone, clinical intake measures alone, or fMRI alone performed similarly in terms of near-identical AUC values (AUC ranging from 67 to 70) (see Figure 5 ).