Identifying ADHD for Children With Coexisting ASD From fNIRs Signals Using Deep Learning Approach

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for children is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders and its prevalence has increased globally. Children with ADHD are faced with various difficulties, including inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Therefore, it is important to use an early detection system that is simple, non-invasive, and automated. Children with ADHD also suffer from other coexisting one or more disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), etc and it creates more challenges to detect ADHD children. Very few researchers considered such kinds of these comorbidities in their studies to detect ADHD for children. In this work, we proposed a deep learning (DL)-based algorithm to identify ADHD children with coexisting ASD. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRs) signals from thirteen ADHD children who have coexisting ASD and fifteen typically developing (TD) children were recorded during the drawing of handwriting patterns. We asked each child to draw periodic lines (PL) and zigzag lines (ZL) under the predict and trace condition and repeated them three times. Finally, a hybrid approach was designed by combining convolutional neural networks (CNN) and bidirectional long short-time memory (Bi-LSTM) to determine children with ADHD who have ASD. The experimental results showed that our proposed hybrid approach could determine ADHD children with coexisting ASD with a classification accuracy of 94.0%, a sensitivity of 89.7%, specificity of 97.8%, f1-score of 93.3%, and AUC of 0.938, respectively, for the PL predict task.