Sharif Digital Repository

In qualitative content analysis research with the aim of identifying areas of language impairmenthigh-functioning Persian-speaking autistic children, ten subjects were observed during fifteen training sessions which were the cognitive block of a three-block training program. Each session lasted 90 minutes and was video recorded. Prior to this, focus group interviews with specialists and semi-structured interviews with mothers and parallel to that focus group interviews with mothers were handled all of which were audio recorded. After two levels of initial and second coding, a final list of areas of impairment in the language of high-functioning Persian-speaking autistic children, that... 

Development of the fMRI imaging method gives the scientists the opportunity to record functional images from the brain with high spatial resolution and several researches were conducted on this field. Autistic people’s brain has functional differences with normal people. In this paper these differences have been studied. At first fMRI datasets from autistic subjects and control have been recorded and preprocessed. Then the independent components from these datasets have been extracted using group ICA method. Any independent component is an image depicting a brain network. There is a time series for each image which shows the temporal variations of each component. In the next step, the... 

The present case study investigates the effect of applying a humanoid robot as a teacher- assistant to teach a foreign language (English in this case) to Iranian children with autism. Two groups of three male high-functioning autistic students (6-10 years old) with little or no background in English participated in the current study. The humanoid robot NAO made by Aldebaran Robotics was used as a teacher assistant to teach English to the Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL) group. The non-RALL group received the same lessons simply without the presence of the robot in teaching sessions. However, the non-RALL group also had the chance to interact with the robot through some robotic games... 

Statistics have shown an endemic worldwide increase of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since the 1960s, Iran also faces the same problem. Autistic disorders are characterized by three major behavioral disorders: impaired social interaction, impaired communication, and impaired imagination and social creativity. The usage of robots in autism diagnosis and treatment has been increasing in recent years. In this study, our objective (as one of the pioneers in Iran) is to explore the clinical application of two interactive social humanoid robots (NAO and ALICE with the Iranian names of NIMA and MINA) as medical assistants in the treatment and education of children with autism in order to... 

Brain is the most complex part of the human body. This three pound organ acting as seed of intelligence, database of memories, interpreter of the senses, and managing our movement. Network neuroscience plays an important role in revealing hidden aspects of brain functions. Recently, multilayer network models have been proposed to achieve a deeper analysis on the brain networks. Multilayer network is a framework that can represent multiple relations between nodes. In a single layer brain network, different shared information methods can be used to find connection between Regions of Interests (ROIs), but in a multilayer approach, ROIs can have multiple connections in different domains such as... 

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a strong genetic perturbation that encompasses a wide range of clinical symptoms, including functional at different regions of the brain, repetitive behaviors, and interests, weaknesses in social relationships, some sensitivities to environmental factors and etc. Genetic complexity and the impact of environmental factors put the disease in the category of Level 1 complex developmental disorders.We proposed a pilot, combined, and highly effective structure to identify biomarkers in the autism spectrum disorder that could be extended to other diseases that have a similar genetic architecture with autism. We also develop a Gene-tissue interaction network to... 

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders that cause repetitive behaviors and social and communication skills abnormalities. Autistic Disorder(AD) is one of the disorders in ASD that is being investigated in this study. There has been an increase in research about AD in recent years due to the increasing AD prevalence and the high autistic living costs. The dynamic functional connectivity between healthy and autistic groups has been analyzed by using graph theory. The brain is modeled as a dynamic graph using resting-state fMRI. The graph theory metric is calculated in the dynamic graph of each subject, and the distinction of the two groups is checked using... 

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been defined as developmental disorders characterized by abnormalities in social interaction, communication skills, and behavioral flexibility. Over the past decades, studies using various genetic, neurobiological, cognitive and behavioral approaches have sought a single explanation for the heterogeneous manifestations of ASD, but no consensus on the etiology of ASD has emerged. Further studies aim to clarify the mechanism of disease.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a new way of imaging which evaluates activity of brain by measuring magnetic difference caused by oscillation in blood oxygen level. fMRI has been widely used in recent... 

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder for which there is no definitive cure and it is increasing every year for people with this disorder. In the last decade, the use of virtual environment to improve the skills of people on the autism spectrum has increased. In this research, a semi-intelligent algorithm was designed for a virtual reality game that could provide a more appropriate step to the user according to the user's responses. Our focus is on designing games to strengthen the child in terms of shared attention and eye contact. In other words, we seek to create a virtual environment with the ability to intelligently adapt to interact with our user and turn it into a suitable coaching... 

From the creation of the first robots, researchers have been fascinated by the possibility of interaction between a robot and its environment, by the possibility of robots interacting with each other and with humans. The common, underlying assumption is that humans prefer to interact with machines in the same way that they interact with other people. In this work, an assistant robot is developed based on a commercial platform, known as Alice R-50 (with the Iranian name of Mina). Alice is designed specifically for human-robot social interaction and has been used widely for studies on developmental and social robotics. It is used to improve and encourage the development of communication and...