# Boosting Automatic COVID-19 Detection Performance with Self-Supervised Learning and Batch Knowledge Ensembling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [CheXNet: Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05225/) (2017)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [COVID-Net: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09871/) (2020)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Models Genesis: Generic Autodidactic Models for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06912/) (2019)
- [Automatic Detection of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Using X-ray Images and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10849/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Localization using Variational Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02796/) (2019)
- [Deep-COVID: Predicting COVID-19 From Chest X-Ray Images Using Deep Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09363/) (2020)
- [CovidGAN: Data Augmentation Using Auxiliary Classifier GAN for Improved Covid-19 Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05094/) (2021)
- [Understanding Self-supervised Learning with Dual Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00578/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Continual Self-supervised Learning Considering Medical Domain Knowledge in Chest CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04217/) (2025)
- [Privacy-Aware Continual Self-Supervised Learning on Multi-Window Chest Computed Tomography for Domain-Shift Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27213/) (2025)
- [Dual-Model Weight Selection and Self-Knowledge Distillation for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20461/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Problem: Detecting COVID-19 from chest X-Ray (CXR) images has become one of the fastest and easiest methods for detecting COVID-19. However, the existing methods usually use supervised transfer learning from natural images as a pretraining process. These methods do not consider the unique features of COVID-19 and the similar features between COVID-19 and other pneumonia. Aim: In this paper, we want to design a novel high-accuracy COVID-19 detection method that uses CXR images, which can consider the unique features of COVID-19 and the similar features between COVID-19 and other pneumonia. Methods: Our method consists of two phases. One is self-supervised learning-based pertaining; the other is batch knowledge ensembling-based fine-tuning. Self-supervised learning-based pretraining can learn distinguished representations from CXR images without manually annotated labels. On the other hand, batch knowledge ensembling-based fine-tuning can utilize category knowledge of images in a batch according to their visual feature similarities to improve detection performance. Unlike our previous implementation, we introduce batch knowledge ensembling into the fine-tuning phase, reducing the memory used in self-supervised learning and improving COVID-19 detection accuracy. Results: On two public COVID-19 CXR datasets, namely, a large dataset and an unbalanced dataset, our method exhibited promising COVID-19 detection performance. Our method maintains high detection accuracy even when annotated CXR training images are reduced significantly (e.g., using only 10% of the original dataset). In addition, our method is insensitive to changes in hyperparameters.