ABSTRACT
COVID-19 is considered one of the most deadly pandemics by the World Health Organization and has claimed the lives of millions around the world. Mechanisms for early diagnosis and detection of this rapidly spreading disease are necessary to save lives. However, the increase in COVID-19 cases requires not relying on traditional means of detecting diseases due to these tests' limitations and high costs. One diagnostic technique for COVID-19 is X-rays and CT scans. For accurate and highly efficient diagnosis, computer-aided diagnosis is required. In this research, we suggest a convolutional neural network for chest x-ray images categorisation into two classes of infection: COVID-19 and normal. The suggested model uses an upgraded model based on the VGG-16 architecture that has been trained end-to-end on a dataset composed of X-ray images obtained from two different public data repositories, which include 1,320 and 1,578 cases in the COVID-19 and normal classes, respectively. This suggested model was trained and evaluated on the provided dataset and showed that our proposed model showed improved performance in the matter of overall accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score at 99.54%, 99.5%, 99.5%, and 99.5%, respectively. The system's significance is supported because it has greater accuracy than other contemporary deep learning methods in the literature on COVID-19 identification.