ABSTRACT
Deep learning techniques combined with radiological imaging provide precision in the diagnosis of diseases that can be utilised for the classification and diagnosis of several diseases in the medical sector. Several research studies have focused on binary classification of COVID-19, and there is limited research focusing on multiclass classification of COVID-19. The purpose of this study is to develop a model that can enhance the multiclass classification of COVID-19 using raw chest X-ray images. The study involved using convolutional neural networks as the classifier. Five pre-trained deep learning models including VGG16, MobileNet, EfficientNetB0, NasNetMobile and ResNet50V2 are used to distinguish between COVID-19 infection and other lung diseases. Data Augmentation and Normalization techniques have been used to improve the models' performance and avoid training problems. The study findings revealed that it is possible to distinguish between COVID-19 infection and other lung diseases using pre-trained deep learning models. The proposed technique successfully classifies five classes (normal, COVID-19, lung opacity, viral pneumonia, and bacterial pneumonia). It is found that NasNetMobile model outperformed the rest of the models and achieved the highest results. It achieved an overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and precision of 91%, 91%, 97.7% and 91%, respectively. The VGG16 model produced better results in detecting COVID-19 infection, resulting in an accuracy of 95.8%. The suggested technique is more accurate in comparison to the other newly developed techniques presented in the literature. This provides healthcare staff with a powerful tool for the diagnosis of COVID-19 based on deep learning. © 2023 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.