Multi-modal Autism Phenotype Snapshot (MAPS): Automated measurement of outcomes for children with autism

Sample Link to test

Targeting core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a key treatment goal for parents of children with ASD. While many efficacious treatments for ASD have been developed, a major obstacle in evaluating these treatments among children with ASD has been the lack of adequate outcome measures (Anagnostou et al., 2014; Bolte & Diehl, 2013; Kanne et al., 2014). Most treatment studies have relied on informant-based measures (i.e., parent or clinician report) that either place a high burden on families, or require significant training and time to administer. Moreover, measures are often re-purposed from existing measures intended for screening or diagnosis, and do not provide continuous measures of symptoms that are responsive to change. Thus, there is a clear need to develop ASD outcome measures that are reliable, valid, and sensitive to change. In the absence of such outcome measures, our understanding of the efficacy of treatments for ASD will continue to be limited.

At the same time, automated methods for quantifying behavior have become more advanced, less intrusive, and more cost-effective, and could provide reliable and sensitive measures of behavioral change. However, these methods have yet to be translated into a viable outcome measure for use in treatment studies. For example, recent research has shown that autism symptoms can be objectively measured with automated methods such as eye-tracking (Rice, Moriuchi, Jones, & Klin, 2012), natural language processing (Gorman et al., 2016; Rouhizadeh et al., 2014; van Santen, Sproat, & Hill, 2013), and quantitative facial emotion analysis (Metallinou, Grossman, & Narayanan, 2013), and that such measures are interpretable and meaningful for the everyday lives of children and their families.

The goal of this project is to develop and validate a novel objective measurement tool, the Multi-modal Autism Phenotype Snapshot (MAPS), for use in clinical trials targeting core symptoms of autism. MAPS uses automated methods to measure autism-relevant behaviors across multiple modalities (gaze-tracking, natural language processing, facial expression analysis) while children watch and respond to audiovisual stimuli presented on a laptop. This project was funded by a Catalyst Award from the Oregon Clinical & Translational Research Institute.