Diagnosing COVID-19 Severity from Chest X-Ray Images Using ViT and CNN
  Architectures
Authors: name: Luis Lara; name: Lucia Eve Berger; name: Rajesh Raju; name: Shawn Whitfield
Published: 2025-02-23 15:50:42

Abstract: 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.