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Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database
Project Element Element Description

Project Title

Project Title

Developing Scalable Measures of Behavior Change for ASD Treatments- Project 1

Principal Investigator

Principal Investigator

Kolevzon, Alexander

Description

Description

Research assessing the effectiveness of treatments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited by a lack of scalable and quantifiable autism-specific treatment response measures. Assessing treatment success would be benefited by the development of response measures that can be administered ‘blindly’ and are sensitive enough to capture change over short periods of time, flexible enough to be used across studies and are standardized in order to be comparable across sites. Catherine Lord and her colleagues will test the proof of concept of the Brief Observation of Social Communication – Change (BOSCC), a new 12-minute observation assessment of social communication behaviors in children with autism. The BOSCC is designed to be sensitive to changes in social communication behavior, easily used by naïve, minimally trained examiners and coded relatively quickly by non-expert raters. In addition, the BOSCC will incorporate automatic methods of acoustic signal processing to further quantify changes in social communication. To assess the utility and accessibility of BOSCC, Lord and her team will recruit 120 children with autism currently participating in short-term, evidence-based social communication treatments at four university-based autism centers in the New York metropolitan area: Weill Cornell Medical College, New York University Langone Medical Center, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. An additional 80 children from the same centers, but who are not participating in a specific treatment, will also be recruited. Both groups will receive a BOSCC, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and parent-report measures of behavior and a clinician-rated global impression at the start and completion of treatment or an equivalent period. Signal processing and machine-learning techniques will be used to develop automatic measures of speech and language characteristics that may yield more sensitive or supplemental measures to behavior coding. BOSCC codes of the brief observation will be compared with alternative measures of change, including BOSCC codes of ADOS videos, as well as the automated acoustic measures. By testing the feasibility of the new BOSCC scale at four different sites and on ASD individuals undergoing different treatments, the team will establish the validity, accessibility, psychometric properties and sensitivity to change of BOSCC for providing scalable response measures of behavioral change in 200 children from early school age to mid-adolescence.

Funder

Funder

Simons Foundation

Funding Country

Funding Country

United States

Fiscal Year Funding

Fiscal Year Funding

19952

Current Award Period

Current Award Period

2015-2018

Strategic Plan Question

Strategic Plan Question

Question 1: How Can I Recognize the Signs of ASD, and Why is Early Detection So Important?

Funder’s Project Link

Funder’s Project Link

External Project Page Go to website disclaimer

Institution

Institution

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Institute Location

Institute Location

United States

Project Number

Project Number

345327AK

Government or Private

Government or Private

Private

History/Related Projects

History/Related Projects

Developing Scalable Measures of Behavior Change for ASD Treatments- Project 1 | 19952 | 2015 | 345327AK
Developing Scalable Measures of Behavior Change for ASD Treatments- Project 1 | 19952 | 2017 | 345327AK
Developing Scalable Measures of Behavior Change for ASD Treatments- Project 1 | 0 | 2018 | 345327AK

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