A Trustworthy Curriculum Learning Guided Multi-Target Domain Adaptation Network for Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification

Domain adaptation has demonstrated success in classification of multi-center autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, current domain adaptation methods primarily focus on classifying data in a single target domain with the assistance of one or multiple source domains, lacking the capability to address the clinical scenario of identifying ASD in multiple target domains. In response to this limitation, we propose a Trustworthy Curriculum Learning Guided Multi-Target Domain Adaptation (TCL-MTDA) network for identifying ASD in multiple target domains. To effectively handle varying degrees of data shift in multiple target domains, we propose a trustworthy curriculum learning procedure based on the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) Theory of Evidence. Additionally, a domain-contrastive adaptation method is integrated into the TCL-MTDA process to align data distributions between source and target domains, facilitating the learning of domain-invariant features. The proposed TCL-MTDA method is evaluated on 437 subjects (including 220 ASD patients and 217 NCs) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in multi-target ASD classification, achieving an average accuracy of 71.46% (95% CI: 68.85% - 74.06%) across four target domains, significantly outperforming most baseline methods (p<0.05).