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With recent advances in computing resources and availability of large-scale medical image datasets, many deep learning models have been developed for disease diagnosis from medical images. However, existing techniques focus on sub-tasks, e.g., disease classification and identification, individually, while there is a lack of a unified framework enabling multi-task diagnosis. Inspired by the capability of Vision Transformers in both patch-based and image-based representation learning, we propose in this paper a new method, namely Multi-task Vision Transformer (MVC) for simultaneously classifying chest X-ray images and identifying affected regions from the input data. Our method is built upon the Vision Transformer but extends its learning capability in a multi-task setting. We evaluated our proposed method and compared it with existing baselines on a benchmark dataset of COVID-19 chest X-ray images. Experimental results verified the superiority of the proposed method over the baselines on both the image classification and affected region identification tasks.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s00521-026-12169-x","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,1]],"date-time":"2026-06-01T06:16:00Z","timestamp":1780294560000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["MVC: a multi-task vision transformer network for COVID-19 diagnosis from chest X-ray images"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"38","author":[{"given":"Huyen","family":"Tran","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Duc Thanh","family":"Nguyen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"John","family":"Yearwood","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,1]]},"reference":[{"issue":"2","key":"12169_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"635","DOI":"10.1007\/s13246-020-00865-4","volume":"43","author":"ID Apostolopoulos","year":"2020","unstructured":"Apostolopoulos ID, Mpesiana TA (2020) COVID-19: automatic detection from X-ray images utilizing transfer learning with convolutional neural networks. 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