Neuro connect: Integrating data-driven and BiGRU classification for enhanced autism prediction from fMRI data

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) poses a significant challenge in early diagnosis and intervention due to its multifaceted clinical presentation and lack of objective biomarkers. This research presents a novel approach, termed Neuro Connect, which integrates data-driven techniques with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) classification to enhance the prediction of ASD using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. This study uses both structural and functional neuroimaging data to investigate the complex brain underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They use an Auto-Encoder (AE) to efficiently reduce dimensionality while retaining critical information by learning and compressing important characteristics from high-dimensional data. We treat the feature-extracted data using a BiGRU model for the classification task of predicting ASD. They provide a new optimization strategy, the Horse Herd Algorithm (HHA), and show that it outperforms other established optimizers, such SGD and Adam, in order to improve classification accuracy. The model's performance is greatly enhanced by the HHA's novel optimization technique, which more precisely refines weight modifications made during training. The proposed ASD and EEG dataset accuracy value is 99.5%, and 99.3 compared to the existing method the proposed has a high accuracy value.