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This paper extends our previous method for COVID-19 diagnosis, proposing an enhanced solution for detecting COVID-19 from computed tomography (CT) images using a lean transfer learning-based model. To decrease model misclassifications, two key steps of image processing were employed. Firstly, the uppermost and lowermost slices were removed, preserving sixty percent of each patient's slices. Secondly, all slices underwent manual cropping to emphasize the lung areas. Subsequently, resized CT scans (224 × 224) were input into an Xception transfer learning model with a modified output. Both Xception's architecture and pretrained weights were leveraged in the method. A big and rigorously annotated database of CT images was used to verify the method. The number of patients/subjects in the dataset is more than 5000, and the number and shape of the slices in each CT scan varies greatly. Verification was made both on the validation partition and on the test partition of unseen images. Results on the COV19-CT database showcased not only improvement from our previous solution and the baseline but also comparable performance to the highest-achieving methods on the same dataset. Further validation studies could explore the scalability and adaptability of the developed methodologies across diverse healthcare settings and patient populations. Additionally, investigating the integration of advanced image processing techniques, such as automated region of interest detection and segmentation algorithms, could enhance the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]