AI-based apparatus for diagnosing pulmonary nodule from chest CT image

An AI-based apparatus for diagnosing pulmonary nodules from a chest CT image, the apparatus comprising:

• a backbone module;
• a pulmonary nodule detection module;
• and
• a pulmonary nodule segmentation header,
• wherein the backbone module comprises:
• a convolution module composed of convolutional layers that receive the chest CT image and each generate a convolutional feature map;
• and
• a ViT-based ViT module composed of ViT layers, each of which generates a ViT feature map by receiving the convolutional feature map generated in the last convolutional layer among the convolutional layers,
• the pulmonary nodule detection module calculates coordinates of a suspicious pulmonary nodule area using the ViT feature map generated in the last ViT layer among the ViT layers, calculates per layer classification probabilities for the respective ViT layers using the suspicious area coordinates, and infers whether there is a pulmonary nodule through ensembling of the per layer classification probabilities and calculating a pulmonary nodule classification probability, and
• the pulmonary nodule segmentation header generates a synthesized feature map by extracting respective suspicious areas from the convolutional feature map generated in each convolutional layer and the ViT feature map generated in the last ViT layer using the suspicious area coordinates when the pulmonary nodule is inferred by the pulmonary nodule detection module, calculates a final classification probability through ensembling of a pulmonary nodule classification probability for the synthesized feature a pulmonary map and nodule classification probability for the suspicious area extracted from the ViT feature map generated in the last ViT layer, and creates a segmentation image of the chest CT image using the synthesized feature map and the final classification probability.