Multiple-network classification of childhood autism using functional connectivity dynamics

Characterization of disease using stationary resting-state functional connectivity (FC) has provided important hallmarks of abnormal brain activation in many domains. Recent studies of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), however, suggest there is a considerable amount of additional knowledge to be gained by investigating the variability in FC over the course of a scan. While a few studies have begun to explore the properties of dynamic FC for characterizing disease, the analysis of dynamic FC over multiple networks at multiple time scales has yet to be fully examined. In this study, we combine dynamic connectivity features in a multi-network, multi-scale approach to evaluate the method's potential in better classifying childhood autism. Specifically, from a set of group-level intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs), we use sliding window correlations to compute intra-network connectivity on the subject level. We derive dynamic FC features for all ICNs over a large range of window sizes and then use a multiple kernel support vector machine (MK-SVM) model to combine a subset of these features for classification. We compare the performance our multi-network, dynamic approach to the best results obtained from single-network dynamic FC features and those obtained from both single- and multi-network static FC features. Our experiments show that integrating multiple networks on different dynamic scales has a clear superiority over these existing methods.