Inter-hemispherical Investigations on the Functional Connectivity of Autistic Resting State fMRI

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders are connected with disturbances of neural connectivity. Functional connectivity is typically examined during a cognitive task, but also exists in the absence of a task i.e., “rest.” Adults with ASD have been found to show weaker connectivity relative to controls. This work focuses on analyzing the brain activation for autistic subjects, measured by fMRI during rest, relative to the control group using interhemispherical analysis. Though both groups activated similarly in cortical areas, indications of under connectivity were exhibited by the autistic group measured by Granger Causality and Conditional Granger Causality. Results show that as connectivity decreases, GC and CGC values also get decreased. The left hemisphere exhibits depreciation in the connectivity in comparison to that of right hemisphere for the autistic individuals whose GC and CGC values keeps decreasing in the left hemisphere seed regions. Finally, the results provide an approach for analyzing the cortical underconnectivity, in clinical relevance for diagnosing autism in children.