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Comment by alach11 | Hacker News Reader

While there's prior associations between retinal photos and autism, I'm by default very skeptical of any AI algorithm purporting "100% accuracy". It smells like data leakage.

I would bet that even physicians aren't 100% consistent in their diagnosis of autism. If that's the case, then it should be more or less impossible for any other diagnostic approach to be 100% consistent with the physician diagnoses.

Edit: After reading the study closer, this criticism might be a bit harsh. In their autism subjects, they excluded those with mild/moderate autism. Limiting to severe cases should mean there's a higher degree of confidence/consistency in the diagnoses.

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I'm not actually sure where the Petapixel article authors are getting the phrase "100% accuracy", as it does not show up in the article they are writing about, nor does it appear in the only other article they link to. Putting it in quotes makes it seem like a claim the model creators are making about their model, but I don't see them making that claim in general. They say the model matched all the sample data in this case, not that it's 100% accurate—presumably for the same reasons you are hesitant to do so. Unless I'm missing something, Petapixel should correct their headline.

You can see the results if you download the pdf from [0].

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> I would bet that even physicians aren't 100% consistent in their diagnosis of autism.

That's because autism is diagnosed by using the DSM. You can take an x-ray of an arm and see the fracture, but in order to diagnose autism you have to determine 'persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts'.

It is all dependent on how society defines things, and is fluid (and IMO, somewhat dubious).

The whole DSM is dubious. Nothing more than a made up tool to pathologize normality and sell more drugs.

https://youtu.be/6JPgpasgueQ?si=dn3muYeOe-cSSKM2

The whole of abnormal psychology is predicated on the existence of the abnormal.

There are subfields of psych that actually function as sciences, like cognitive psychology (not the same as cognitive therapy). There are also some that are far less scientific: looking at you, "evolutionary" psychology! It's a strange mess that propriety says no one should talk about openly.

There’s no real drugs to “fix autism” though, but perhaps the DSM is a contrivance of “big psych”

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