BIOMEDICAL SIGNAL PROCESSING AND CONTROL, cilt.79, sa.2, ss.1-10, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
In this study, an automatic autism diagnostic model based on sMRI is proposed. This proposed model consists of
two basic stages. The first stage is the preprocessing stage, which consists of removing unclear images, identifying the edges of the images by applying the canny edge detection (CED) algorithm, cropping them to the size
required by the system, and finally enlarging the images five times with data augmentation. The data
augmentation method should not affect the discrimination in the images such as coloring, and also since it is
applied to both groups of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typical development (TD), it is performed with
care not to cause any manipulation in the data. In the second stage, the grid search optimization (GSO) algorithm
is applied to the deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) used in the system to have optimal hyperparameters. As a result, the proposed diagnostic method of ASD based on sMRI achieves an outstanding success
rate of 100%. The reliability of the proposed model is validated by testing with five-fold cross-validation, and its
superiority is demonstrated by comparing it with recent studies and widely-used pre-trained models.