# Diagnosing COVID-19 Severity from Chest X-Ray Images Using ViT and CNN Architectures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16622/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Right for the Right Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03717/) (2017)
- [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)
- [TorchXRayVision: A library of chest X-ray datasets and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00595/) (2021)
- [COVID-19 Image Data Collection: Prospective Predictions Are the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11988/) (2020)
- [CoroNet: A deep neural network for detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest x-ray images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04931/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning COVID-19 Features on CXR using Limited Training Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05758/) (2020)
- [On the limits of cross-domain generalization in automated X-ray prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02497/) (2020)
- [COVIDGR dataset and COVID-SDNet methodology for predicting COVID-19 based on Chest X-Ray images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01409/) (2020)
- [Predicting COVID-19 Pneumonia Severity on Chest X-ray with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11856/) (2020)
- [Saliency is a Possible Red Herring When Diagnosing Poor Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00199/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The COVID-19 pandemic strained healthcare resources and prompted discussion about how machine learning can alleviate physician burdens and contribute to diagnosis. Chest x-rays (CXRs) are used for diagnosis of COVID-19, but few studies predict the severity of a patient's condition from CXRs. In this study, we produce a large COVID severity dataset by merging three sources and investigate the efficacy of transfer learning using ImageNet- and CXR-pretrained models and vision transformers (ViTs) in both severity regression and classification tasks. A pretrained DenseNet161 model performed the best on the three class severity prediction problem, reaching 80% accuracy overall and 77.3%, 83.9%, and 70% on mild, moderate and severe cases, respectively. The ViT had the best regression results, with a mean absolute error of 0.5676 compared to radiologist-predicted severity scores. The project's source code is publicly available.