# Deep Learning for Chest X-ray Analysis: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 120 of its 407 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 120)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [Confounding variables can degrade generalization performance of radiological deep learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00431/) (2018)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [AdaCLIP: Adapting CLIP with Hybrid Learnable Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15795/) (2024)
- [EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02028/) (2023)
- [Delving into Masked Autoencoders for Multi-Label Thorax Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12843/) (2022)
- [Review of multimodal machine learning approaches in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02460/) (2024)
- [Risk of Bias in Chest Radiography Deep Learning Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02965/) (2022)
- [EVA-X: A Foundation Model for General Chest X-ray Analysis with Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05237/) (2024)
- [RadVLM: A Multitask Conversational Vision-Language Model for Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03333/) (2025)
- [Beware of diffusion models for synthesizing medical images -- A comparison with GANs in terms of memorizing brain MRI and chest x-ray images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07644/) (2023)
- [A Recent Survey of Vision Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00634/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Computational Cytology: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05126/) (2022)
- [Membership Inference Attack Using Self Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13680/) (2022)
- [MedVH: Towards Systematic Evaluation of Hallucination for Large Vision Language Models in the Medical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02730/) (2024)
- [Dual-Distribution Discrepancy for Anomaly Detection in Chest X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03935/) (2022)
- [Learning A Multi-Task Transformer Via Unified And Customized Instruction Tuning For Chest Radiograph Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01092/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for the Analysis of COVID-19 and their usability for Detecting Omicron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06372/) (2022)
- [Defending against Reconstruction Attacks through Differentially Private Federated Learning for Classification of Heterogeneous Chest X-Ray Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03168/) (2022)
- [Explainable Knowledge Distillation for On-device Chest X-Ray Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06244/) (2023)
- [Nodule detection and generation on chest X-rays: NODE21 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02192/) (2024)
- [FluoroSAM: A Language-promptable Foundation Model for Flexible X-ray Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08059/) (2024)
- [Improving Performance, Robustness, and Fairness of Radiographic AI Models with Finely-Controllable Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16783/) (2025)
- [Computer Vision on X-ray Data in Industrial Production and Security Applications: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05565/) (2022)
- [Boosting multi-demographic federated learning for chest radiograph analysis using general-purpose self-supervised representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08584/) (2025)
- [A unified multi-task framework enables interpretable chest radiograph analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03417/) (2026)
- [Learning to diagnose common thorax diseases on chest radiographs from radiology reports in Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04794/) (2022)
- [Did You Get What You Paid For? Rethinking Annotation Cost of Deep Learning Based Computer Aided Detection in Chest Radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15314/) (2022)
- [Gaze-Guided Class Activation Mapping: Leveraging Human Attention for Network Attention in Chest X-rays Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07107/) (2022)
- [Multi-task UNet: Jointly Boosting Saliency Prediction and Disease Classification on Chest X-ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07118/) (2022)
- [Improving Classification Model Performance on Chest X-Rays through Lung Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10971/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in deep learning have led to a promising performance in many medical image analysis tasks. As the most commonly performed radiological exam, chest radiographs are a particularly important modality for which a variety of applications have been researched. The release of multiple, large, publicly available chest X-ray datasets in recent years has encouraged research interest and boosted the number of publications. In this paper, we review all studies using deep learning on chest radiographs, categorizing works by task: image-level prediction (classification and regression), segmentation, localization, image generation and domain adaptation. Commercially available applications are detailed, and a comprehensive discussion of the current state of the art and potential future directions are provided.