There's been a lot of buzz and some scepticism about the
New brain scan to diagnose autism
Here's a quick overview. Autism is believed to be a disorder of brain development. If so, it should be possible to diagnose it based on a brain scan. Unfortunately, it's not. You can't tell, from a scan, whether someone has autism or not. Not even if you're a world expert.
There are reports of various differences between autistic and non-autistic brains - a bit smaller here, a bit bigger there - but there's a lot of overlap. So at present, diagnosis of autism is purely based on symptoms.
Ecker et al, a team based at the Institute of Psychiatry in South London, made use of a mathematical technique called a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to try to spot differences that the naked eye can't. An SVM is a learning algorithm: you "teach" it ...
