Advertisement
Browse Subject Areas
?

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here.

  • Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

RETRACTED: Can artificial intelligence and face recognition using deep learning detect emotions in children with autism?

  • İbrahim Güngör ,

    Contributed equally to this work with: İbrahim Güngör, Suat Tuncay

    Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

    ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.

    Affiliation Graduate School of Health Sciences, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

    ⨯
  • Abdullah Sarman ,

    Roles Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization

    abdullah.sarman@hotmail.com

    ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.

    Affiliation Department of Pediatric Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, Bingöl University, Bingöl, Turkey

    ⨯
  • Suat Tuncay

    Contributed equally to this work with: İbrahim Güngör, Suat Tuncay

    Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

    ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.

    Affiliation Department of Pediatric Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, Bingöl University, Bingöl, Turkey

    ⨯

Retraction

Following the publication of this article [1] concerns were raised with the datasets used in this study. Specifically, the datasets reportedly present photographs of children with autism spectrum disorder. However, this diagnosis does not appear to have been validated. In addition, it is not clear whether the legal guardians of the children included in the dataset gave consent for these images to be distributed in a public dataset or used in academic research.

All authors responded stating that the use of the Kaggle datasets was a decision made in good faith, relying on what they considered to be the standard practice in the field of AI and Computer Science, and that they were unaware of the issues with the datasets.

In light of the concerns pertaining to the ethics and the validity of the dataset underlying the study, the PLOS One Editors retract this article [1]. PLOS regrets that these issues were not identified prior to publication.

This article [1] was removed from the PLOS One website on December 23, 2025. The article’s Copyright and Data Availability statements were updated at the time of retraction and removal, and the removed contents are no longer offered under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

All authors did not agree with the retraction.

26 Dec 2025: The PLOS One Editors (2025) Retraction: Can artificial intelligence and face recognition using deep learning detect emotions in children with autism?. PLOS ONE 20(12): e0340338. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0340338 View retraction

Citation: Güngör İ, Sarman A, Tuncay S (2025) RETRACTED: Can artificial intelligence and face recognition using deep learning detect emotions in children with autism? PLoS One 20(12): e0338701. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0338701

Editor: Kwang-Sig Lee, Korea University - Seoul Campus: Korea University, KOREA, REPUBLIC OF

Received: August 21, 2025; Accepted: November 26, 2025; Published: December 9, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Güngör et al. Due to the concerns pertaining to the ethics and the validity of the dataset underlying the study, the article contents were removed from PLOS One at the time of retraction. Readers are hereby on notice that the removed contents are not offered under the Creative Commons Attribution License; see the accompanying retraction notice for details.

Data Availability: The Data Availability statement was deleted at the time of the article’s removal. See the accompanying retraction notice for more information.

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.