# EVA-X: A Foundation Model for General Chest X-ray Analysis with Self-supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05237/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [Making the Most of Text Semantics to Improve Biomedical Vision--Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09817/) (2022)
- [BEiT v2: Masked Image Modeling with Vector-Quantized Visual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06366/) (2022)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12306/) (2023)
- [Multi-Granularity Cross-modal Alignment for Generalized Medical Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06044/) (2022)
- [CheXclusion: Fairness gaps in deep chest X-ray classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00827/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [EchoFM: Foundation Model for Generalizable Echocardiogram Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23413/) (2024)
- [3D Foundation Model for Generalizable Disease Detection in Head Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02779/) (2025)
- [M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16318/) (2025)
- [Chest X-ray Foundation Model with Global and Local Representations Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05142/) (2025)
- [Towards All-in-One Medical Image Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08173/) (2025)
- [DeepSparse: A Foundation Model for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02628/) (2025)
- [CX-Mind: A Pioneering Multimodal Large Language Model for Interleaved Reasoning in Chest X-ray via Curriculum-Guided Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03733/) (2025)
- [UniX: Unifying Autoregression and Diffusion for Chest X-Ray Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11522/) (2026)
- [Advancing Embodied Intelligence in Robotic-Assisted Endovascular Procedures: A Systematic Review of AI Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15327/) (2025)
- [A DeepSeek-Powered AI System for Automated Chest Radiograph Interpretation in Clinical Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20344/) (2025)
- [The pretraining domain outweighs the training objective in setting the privacy-utility trade-off of differentially private medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19618/) (2026)
- [Picking the Right Specialist: Attentive Neural Process-based Selection of Task-Specialized Models as Tools for Agentic Healthcare Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14901/) (2026)
- [Automatic Discovery of Disease Subgroups by Contrasting with Healthy Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21301/) (2026)
- [ASAP: Advancing Medical Volumetric Representation Learning with Anatomy-aware Semantically-adaptive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00602/) (2026)
- [Vision Foundation Models in Radiology: A Scoping Review of Data, Methodology, Evaluation and Clinical Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07219/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Vision Language Models (VLMs) for Radiology: A Comprehensive Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16047/) (2025)
- [DeltaMIL: Gated Memory Integration for Efficient and Discriminative Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19331/) (2025)
- [CORA: Generalizable coronary artery disease assessment and risk stratification from coronary CT angiography using pathology-centric representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24847/) (2026)
- [Model-agnostic information transfer and fusion for classification with label noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25845/) (2026)
- [Mirror-Fusion Attention for Reflection-Aware Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00850/) (2026)
- [Clinically-Grounded Hierarchical Classification for Consistent Chest X-ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03016/) (2026)
- [Mr.Dec: Daily-Scale Longitudinal Multimodal Modeling for 30-Day Readmission Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16929/) (2026)
- [Confidence-Gated Cloud-Edge Cascade Triage via Variational Risk Minimization for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02269/) (2026)
- [Representation Disentanglement for Fair Chest X-Ray Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06041/) (2026)
- [A4-MR: Abnormality-aware Anatomical Alignment for MR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13056/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The diagnosis and treatment of chest diseases play a crucial role in maintaining human health. X-ray examination has become the most common clinical examination means due to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Artificial intelligence analysis methods for chest X-ray images are limited by insufficient annotation data and varying levels of annotation, resulting in weak generalization ability and difficulty in clinical dissemination. Here we present EVA-X, an innovative foundational model based on X-ray images with broad applicability to various chest disease detection tasks. EVA-X is the first X-ray image based self-supervised learning method capable of capturing both semantic and geometric information from unlabeled images for universal X-ray image representation. Through extensive experimentation, EVA-X has demonstrated exceptional performance in chest disease analysis and localization, becoming the first model capable of spanning over 20 different chest diseases and achieving leading results in over 11 different detection tasks in the medical field. Additionally, EVA-X significantly reduces the burden of data annotation in the medical AI field, showcasing strong potential in the domain of few-shot learning. The emergence of EVA-X will greatly propel the development and application of foundational medical models, bringing about revolutionary changes in future medical research and clinical practice. Our codes and models are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/EVA-X.