Due to its high transmissibility, the COVID-19 pandemic has placed an unprecedented burden on healthcare systems worldwide. X-ray imaging of the chest has emerged as a valuable and cost-effective tool for detecting and diagnosing COVID-19 patients. In this study, we developed a deep learning model using transfer learning with optimized DenseNet-169 and DenseNet-201 models for three-class classification, utilizing the Nadam optimizer. We modified the traditional DenseNet architecture and tuned the hyperparameters to improve the model’s performance. The model was evaluated on a novel dataset of 3312 X-ray images from publicly available datasets, using metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve. Our results showed impressive detection rate accuracy and recall for COVID-19 patients, with 95.98% and 96% achieved using DenseNet-169 and 96.18% and 99% using DenseNet-201. Unique layer configurations and the Nadam optimization algorithm enabled our deep learning model to achieve high rates of accuracy not only for detecting COVID-19 patients but also for identifying normal and pneumonia-affected patients. The model’s ability to detect lung problems early on, as well as its low false-positive and false-negative rates, suggest that it has the potential to serve as a reliable diagnostic tool for a variety of lung diseases.

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