Measurement of secondary esophageal motility by Endoluminal Functional Lumen Imaging Probe (EndoFLIP) in young patients with pediatric feeding disorder with and without persistent dysphagia.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by persistent differences in social communication and restricted or repetitive behaviors, accompanied by substantial heterogeneity in behavioral presentation and neurobiological organization (). Neuroimaging studies have increasingly emphasized that ASD involves distributed alterations across large-scale brain systems rather than focal abnormalities confined to isolated regions. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played a central role in revealing atypical functional organization in ASD, particularly within association cortices supporting higher cognitive and social processes (Hull et al., 2016). Recent large-scale neuroimaging initiatives further suggest that inter-individual variability in brain network organization represents an important dimension of brain organization in neurodevelopmental conditions. Rather than reflecting uniform deficits, ASD-related neural differences appear to involve altered patterns of inter-individual variability and regional specialization across association cortex, highlighting the importance of approaches capable of characterizing spatial organization beyond average connectivity measures (). Early work highlighted disrupted functional connectivity as a prominent feature of ASD, including altered long-range synchronization and network integration (). Subsequent studies demonstrated that atypical connectivity patterns extend across multiple canonical functional systems, including language, default-mode, and social cognitive networks (). Large multisite datasets further confirmed that functional alterations in ASD are spatially heterogeneous and vary across cortical territories (). These findings suggest that characterizing spatial organization of functional signals may provide complementary information beyond conventional connectivity analyses. Indeed, emerging work has emphasized that functional brain organization can also be described in terms of spatial embedding, whereby functional similarity follows structured spatial constraints across the cortical sheet. Such spatial perspectives complement network-based models by capturing how functional signals vary continuously across cortex rather than being restricted to discrete regions or connections ().