I spent a decent amount working on ADHD diagnostics and unfortunately it sucks. To my knowledge, to this day, there isn’t a single reliable biomarker that identifies autism spectrum disorders. It’s usually correlation studies paired with questionnaires which for lack of better words can be described as “incidental” at best. Most z scored tests I know are also developed with small samples, a hundred participants with an outgroup of 20 would already be a LARGE sample. The standard ADHD questionnaire was validated on some 35 people.

There might be some hope in deep learning, particularly in observing eye movement components to deliver reliable biomarkers in the future, but I’m not so confident any time soon.

It’s dreadful and fascinating at the same time that defining and testing for ADS has been so elusive for so long…