ChestGPT: Integrating Large Language Models and Vision Transformers for Disease Detection and Localization in Chest X-Rays

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Hauptverfasser: Khan, Shehroz S., Przulj, Petar, Ashraf, Ahmed, Abedi, Ali
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Khan, Shehroz S.
Przulj, Petar
Ashraf, Ahmed
Abedi, Ali
author_facet Khan, Shehroz S.
Przulj, Petar
Ashraf, Ahmed
Abedi, Ali
contents The global demand for radiologists is increasing rapidly due to a growing reliance on medical imaging services, while the supply of radiologists is not keeping pace. Advances in computer vision and image processing technologies present significant potential to address this gap by enhancing radiologists' capabilities and improving diagnostic accuracy. Large language models (LLMs), particularly generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), have become the primary approach for understanding and generating textual data. In parallel, vision transformers (ViTs) have proven effective at converting visual data into a format that LLMs can process efficiently. In this paper, we present ChestGPT, a deep-learning framework that integrates the EVA ViT with the Llama 2 LLM to classify diseases and localize regions of interest in chest X-ray images. The ViT converts X-ray images into tokens, which are then fed, together with engineered prompts, into the LLM, enabling joint classification and localization of diseases. This approach incorporates transfer learning techniques to enhance both explainability and performance. The proposed method achieved strong global disease classification performance on the VinDr-CXR dataset, with an F1 score of 0.76, and successfully localized pathologies by generating bounding boxes around the regions of interest. We also outline several task-specific prompts, in addition to general-purpose prompts, for scenarios radiologists might encounter. Overall, this framework offers an assistive tool that can lighten radiologists' workload by providing preliminary findings and regions of interest to facilitate their diagnostic process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03739
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChestGPT: Integrating Large Language Models and Vision Transformers for Disease Detection and Localization in Chest X-Rays
Khan, Shehroz S.
Przulj, Petar
Ashraf, Ahmed
Abedi, Ali
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The global demand for radiologists is increasing rapidly due to a growing reliance on medical imaging services, while the supply of radiologists is not keeping pace. Advances in computer vision and image processing technologies present significant potential to address this gap by enhancing radiologists' capabilities and improving diagnostic accuracy. Large language models (LLMs), particularly generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), have become the primary approach for understanding and generating textual data. In parallel, vision transformers (ViTs) have proven effective at converting visual data into a format that LLMs can process efficiently. In this paper, we present ChestGPT, a deep-learning framework that integrates the EVA ViT with the Llama 2 LLM to classify diseases and localize regions of interest in chest X-ray images. The ViT converts X-ray images into tokens, which are then fed, together with engineered prompts, into the LLM, enabling joint classification and localization of diseases. This approach incorporates transfer learning techniques to enhance both explainability and performance. The proposed method achieved strong global disease classification performance on the VinDr-CXR dataset, with an F1 score of 0.76, and successfully localized pathologies by generating bounding boxes around the regions of interest. We also outline several task-specific prompts, in addition to general-purpose prompts, for scenarios radiologists might encounter. Overall, this framework offers an assistive tool that can lighten radiologists' workload by providing preliminary findings and regions of interest to facilitate their diagnostic process.
title ChestGPT: Integrating Large Language Models and Vision Transformers for Disease Detection and Localization in Chest X-Rays
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03739