Brain structural underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder revealed by sulcus-based morphometry

Autism Spectrum Disorder is associated with an altered early brain development. However, the specific cortical structure abnormalities underlying this disorder remain largely unknown. Here, we designed a multi-modal segmentation pipeline adapted to anatomical MR images acquired in a clinical setting in order to apply state-of-the-art sulcus-based morphometry methods to a large cohort of 73 young children. We computed multiple descriptors of the geometry of each sulcus, hereby separating the folding measurement into distinct factors such as the length and depth of the sulcus. We demonstrated that several sulci showed a significant and consistent pattern of abnormalities across our different geometrical features. These structural abnormalities are confined to regions that are functionally relevant with respect to cognitive disorders in ASD, and might thus represent a set of complementary anatomical markers of this pathology.