ABSTRACT
The conventional approach for identifying ground glass opacities (GGO) in medical imaging is to use a convolutional neural network (CNN), a subset of artificial intelligence, which provides promising performance in COVID-19 detection. However, CNN is still limited in capturing structured relationships of GGO as the texture and shape of the GGO can be confused with other structures in the image. In this paper, a novel framework called DeepChestNet is proposed that leverages structured relationships by jointly performing segmentation and classification on the lung, pulmonary lobe, and GGO, leading to enhanced detection of COVID-19 with findings. The performance of DeepChestNet in terms of dice similarity coefficient is 99.35%, 99.73%, and 97.89% for the lung, pulmonary lobe, and GGO segmentation, respectively. The experimental investigations on DeepChestNet-Lung, DeepChestNet-Lobe and DeepChestNet-COVID datasets, and comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches reveal the great potential of DeepChestNet for diagnosis of COVID-19 disease. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.