Automatic Cry Analysis: Deep Learning for Screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Early Childhood

Purpose The objective of this study is to identify the acoustic characteristics of cries of Typically Developing (TD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children via Deep Learning (DL) techniques to support clinicians in the early detection of ASD. Methods We used an existing cry dataset that included 31 children with ASD and 31 TD children aged between 18 and 54 months. Statistical analysis was applied to find differences between groups for different voice acoustic features such as jitter, shimmer and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR). A DL model based on Recursive Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN) was developed to classify cries of ASD and TD children. Results We found a statistical significant increase in jitter and shimmer for ASD cries compared to TD, as well as a decrease in HNR for ASD cries. Additionally, the DL algorithm achieved an accuracy of 90.28% in differentiating ASD cries from TD. Conclusion Empowering clinicians with automatic non-invasive Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools based on cry vocal bio- markers holds considerable promise in advancing early detection and intervention initiatives for children at risk of ASD, thereby improving their developmental trajectories.