CARE-ASD · Clinician-Aligned Reasoning and Explanation Framework for Autism Spectrum Disorder Screening

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Project objective

Autism (ASD) affects 1 in 36 children (2.7%) in the US, with a 700% increase in diagnosis since 1998. Early diagnosis is essential, as interventions during early brain development significantly improve outcomes. However, the current gold-standard assessment, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), is time-consuming, requires expert clinicians, and causes long waits that delay support. Machine learning (ML) can support more scalable and efficient screening, but most existing models rely only on perceptual pattern recognition and act as “black boxes”, generating predictions without explaining how they were reached. This project addresses this limitation by separating perception (ML-based detection of behavioural cues: gestures, attention shifts, interactions) from reasoning (their clinical interpretation within the ADOS framework using clinician-defined rules). This makes the system transparent and clinically meaningful. The main contributions are: (1) the release of a large-scale dataset densely annotated with gestures and ADOS items; (2) a ML architecture that uses specialised ""experts"" in gaze, gesture, and object-use patterns and combine them for gestures and ADOS item prediction; and (3) a clinician-in-the-loop application that displays extracted behaviours and maps them to ADOS scores using symbolic reasoning. The project will be hosted at Inria (France), with clinical collaboration at CHU Nice. I will conduct a secondment at Idiap (Switzerland), where I will train in attention modelling and access a large-scale ASD dataset. If successful, the project will provide clinicians with interpretable decision support tools, improving ASD subtype differentiation and shortening assessment delays that impact children and their families. Moreover, this fellowship gives me a unique opportunity to work with leading experts, collaborate with clinicians, and gain the transferable skills to achieve my goal of building and leading my own research group.""

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQUE ET AUTOMATIQUE · Le Chesnay CedexCoordinatorFrance
• FONDATION DE L'INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE IDIAP · MartignySwitzerland

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101272930