Multi-task vision transformer using low-level chest X-ray feature corpus for COVID-19 diagnosis and severity quantification

Developing a robust algorithm to diagnose and quantify the severity of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) using Chest X-ray (CXR) requires a large number of well-curated COVID-19 datasets, which is difficult to collect under the global COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, CXR data with other findings are abundant. This situation is ideally suited for the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, where a lot of unlabeled data can be used through structural modeling by the self-attention mechanism. However, the use of existing ViT may not be optimal, as the feature embedding by direct patch flattening or ResNet backbone in the standard ViT is not intended for CXR. To address this problem, here we propose a novel Multi-task ViT that leverages low-level CXR feature corpus obtained from a backbone network that extracts common CXR findings. Specifically, the backbone network is first trained with large public datasets to detect common abnormal findings such as consolidation, opacity, edema, etc. Then, the embedded features from the backbone network are used as corpora for a versatile Transformer model for both the diagnosis and the severity quantification of COVID-19. We evaluate our model on various external test datasets from totally different institutions to evaluate the generalization capability. The experimental results confirm that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both diagnosis and severity quantification tasks with outstanding generalization capability, which are sine qua non of widespread deployment.