The emerging deep learning algorithms have shown significant potential in the development of efficient computer aided diagnosis tools for automated detection of lung infections using chest radiographs. However, many existing methods are slice-based and require manual selection of appropriate slices from the entire CT scan, which is tedious and requires expert radiologists. To overcome these limitations, we propose a recurrent 3D Inception network (R3DI-Net) that sequentially exploits spatial and 3D structural features of the entire CT scan, ultimately leading to improved diagnostic performance. Additionally, the proposed
method flexibly handles input CT scans with a variable number of slices without incurring performance degradation. A quantitative evaluation of R3DI-Net was made using a combined collection of three publicly accessible datasets containing a sufficient number of data samples. Our method outperforms various existing methods by achieving remarkable performances of 98.39%, 98.36%, 98.1%, and 98.64% in terms of accuracy, F1-score, sensitivity, and average precision, respectively.