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Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

We investigated whether individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) would show attentional modulation for social (face) and non-social (house) stimuli. Sixteen individuals with ASD and 16 matched control participants completed a task in which pairs of face and house stimuli were present on every trial, with one of the pairs randomly assigned to attended locations and the other to unattended locations. Both mass-univariate (SPM) and region of interest analyses suggested that responses to houses were modulated by attention in both groups, but that only the control participants demonstrated attentional modulation of face-selective regions. Thus, the participants with ASD demonstrated a lack of attentional modulation which was particularly evident for the social stimulus. Analyses of effective connectivity indicated that these results were due to a failure of attention to modulate connectivity between extrastriate areas and V1. We discuss how these results may suggest a mechanism to explain the reduced salience of social stimuli in ASD.
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PMID:Attention does not modulate neural responses to social stimuli in autism spectrum disorders. 1661 62

Previous studies applying automatic preprocessing methods on Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) report inconsistent neuroanatomical abnormalities in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this study we investigate inter-method differences as a possible cause behind these inconsistent findings. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the following brain volumes: gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and total intra cranial volume (TIV). T1-weighted sMRIs of 417 ASD subjects and 459 typically developing controls (TDC) from the ABIDE dataset were estimated using three popular preprocessing methods: SPM, FSL, and FreeSurfer (FS). Brain volumes estimated by the three methods were correlated but had significant inter-method differences; except TIVSPM vs. TIVFS, all inter-method differences were significant. ASD vs. TDC group differences in all brain volume estimates were dependent on the method used. SPM showed that TIV, GM, and CSF volumes of ASD were larger than TDC with statistical significance, whereas FS and FSL did not show significant differences in any of the volumes; in some cases, the direction of the differences were opposite to SPM. When methods were compared with each other, they showed differential biases for autism, and several biases were larger than ASD vs. TDC differences of the respective methods. After manual inspection, we found inter-method segmentation mismatches in the cerebellum, sub-cortical structures, and inter-sulcal CSF. In addition, to validate automated TIV estimates we performed manual segmentation on a subset of subjects. Results indicate that SPM estimates are closest to manual segmentation, followed by FS while FSL estimates were significantly lower. In summary, we show that ASD vs. TDC brain volume differences are method dependent and that these inter-method discrepancies can contribute to inconsistent neuroimaging findings in general. We suggest cross-validation across methods and emphasize the need to develop better methods to increase the robustness of neuroimaging findings.
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PMID:Inter-Method Discrepancies in Brain Volume Estimation May Drive Inconsistent Findings in Autism. 2774 13