Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is accompanied by brain tissue changes in areas that control behavior, cognition, and motor functions, deficient in the disorder. The objective of this research was to evaluate brain structural changes in ASD patients compared to control subjects using voxel-by-voxel image entropy from T1-weighted imaging data of 115 ASD and 105 control subjects from autism brain imaging data exchange. For all subjects, entropy maps were calculated, normalized to a common space and smoothed. Then, the entropy maps were compared at each voxel between groups using analysis of covariance (covariates; age, gender). Increased entropy in ASD patients, indicating chronic injury, emerged in several vital regions including frontal temporal and parietal lobe regions, corpus callosum, cingulate cortices, and hippocampi. Entropy procedure showed significant effect size and demonstrated wide-spread changes in sites that control social behavior, cognitive, and motor activities, suggesting severe damage in those areas. The neuropathological mechanisms contributing to tissue injury remain unclear and possibly due to factors including genetic, atypical early brain growth during childhood.
