Sex-Stratified Functional Brain Connectivity Patterns in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Machine Learning Analysis of the ABIDE I Dataset

This study analyzed resting-state fMRI data from 989 subjects using machine learning to identify sex-specific functional connectivity patterns in autism. Results showed that female-specific models had substantially lower sensitivity for detecting ASD compared to male models, with only 2% overlap in discriminative brain connections between sexes, highlighting why autism remains underdiagnosed in females.