A lot of research has been applied to structural studies of the brains of people with autism. MRI technology emerged in the 1980s and by the 1990’s groups were applying it to autism. More recently, fMRI (functional MRI) has been available, and many of the same teams are working with that.

Two of the big labs in structural imaging (and now functional imaging) in autism are those of Dr. Courchesne (U.C. San Diego) and Dr. Minshew (Carnegie Mellon). Both groups now run “Autism Centers of Excellence” through the NIH and Combatting Autism Act.

That all said, a lot of data have been collected. Now, someone is putting it to a new use: attempting to use it as an early identification technique for autism, as discussed in this news story. The someone is a team at Missouri University, with a researcher named Ye Duan involved. They are looking at facial and brain images to see if they can pick out which ones are indicative of autism.

MRI images of brains for Missouri Univeristy story

They are looking at subgroups of people with autism. In specific:

Duan’s facial and brain imaging work will focus on two ASD subgroups hypothetically identified by Judith Miles, the William and Nancy Thompson Endowed Chair in Child Health at the Thompson Center. She has observed and distinguished children with a tendency toward more physical and brain abnormalities and smaller heads as having complex autism. Only about 20 percent of affected children fit this subset. The other 80 percent are classified as having essential autism. Miles also has identified physical similarities in facial structure and increased cranium size among those in the essential group and has speculated that the traits may be related to brain abnormalities.

From the image (taken from the story), it appears that Duan’s group will be looking a the corpus callosum, the main structure which links the two brain hemispheres. It also appears to me that they are looking at the ventricle system as well.

This looks like a very interesting avenue of research. And, I might add, pretty inexpensive in relationship to medical research.