Background: The efficacy of educational strategies is crucial for nursing students to competently perform pediatric procedures like nasogastric tube insertion. Specific Background: This study evaluates the effectiveness of simulation, blended, and self-directed learning strategies in enhancing these skills among nursing students. Knowledge Gap: Previous research lacks a comprehensive comparison of these strategies' impacts on skill development in pediatric nursing contexts. Aims: The study aims to assess the effectiveness of different educational strategies on nursing students' ability to perform pediatric nasogastric tube insertions. Methods: A pre-experimental design was employed at the College of Nursing, University of Baghdad, involving 60 students divided into three groups. Data were collected via an observational checklist from October to December 2023 and analyzed using SPSS. Results: Significant improvements in students' skills were observed across all groups. Simulation strategy showed highly significant differences with p-values of .001 and large effect sizes (Partial Eta Squared: .887, .902, .582). Blended strategy also demonstrated significant results with p-values of .001 and large effect sizes (Partial Eta Squared: .813, .936, .883). The self-directed strategy was similarly effective, with p-values of .001 and large effect sizes (Partial Eta Squared: .871, .739, .667). Descriptive statistics revealed a notable increase in mean scores in post-tests, indicating the effectiveness of these strategies. Novelty: This study uniquely compares the effectiveness of simulation, blended, and self-directed learning strategies, providing comprehensive insights into their impacts on pediatric nursing education. Implications: The findings underscore the importance of incorporating diverse learning strategies in nursing curricula to enhance practical skills, suggesting that a combination of these methods could be most beneficial for student learning and competence in clinical settings. Highlights: Effective Strategies: Simulation, blended, and self-directed learning enhance pediatric nursing skills. Significant Improvement: All methods showed highly significant skill development with large effect sizes. Unique Comparison: The study provides valuable insights for nursing education curricula. Keywords: Nursing education, pediatric skills, nasogastric tube insertion, simulation learning, blended learning
General Background: Deep image matting is a fundamental task in computer vision, enabling precise foreground extraction from complex backgrounds, with applications in augmented reality, computer graphics, and video processing. Specific Background: Despite advancements in deep learning-based methods, preserving fine details such as hair and transparency remains a challenge. Knowledge Gap: Existing approaches struggle with accuracy and efficiency, necessitating novel techniques to enhance matting precision. Aims: This study integrates deep learning with fusion techniques to improve alpha matte estimation, proposing a lightweight U-Net model incorporating color-space fusion and preprocessing. Results: Experiments using the AdobeComposition-1k
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... Show MoreCurrently, one of the topical areas of application of machine learning methods is the prediction of material characteristics. The aim of this work is to develop machine learning models for determining the rheological properties of polymers from experimental stress relaxation curves. The paper presents an overview of the main directions of metaheuristic approaches (local search, evolutionary algorithms) to solving combinatorial optimization problems. Metaheuristic algorithms for solving some important combinatorial optimization problems are described, with special emphasis on the construction of decision trees. A comparative analysis of algorithms for solving the regression problem in CatBoost Regressor has been carried out. The object of
... Show MoreIn this article, the research presents a general overview of deep learning-based AVSS (audio-visual source separation) systems. AVSS has achieved exceptional results in a number of areas, including decreasing noise levels, boosting speech recognition, and improving audio quality. The advantages and disadvantages of each deep learning model are discussed throughout the research as it reviews various current experiments on AVSS. The TCD TIMIT dataset (which contains top-notch audio and video recordings created especially for speech recognition tasks) and the Voxceleb dataset (a sizable collection of brief audio-visual clips with human speech) are just a couple of the useful datasets summarized in the paper that can be used to test A
... Show MoreMachine Learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly being utilized in the medical field to manage and diagnose diseases, leading to improved patient treatment and disease management. Several recent studies have found that Covid-19 patients have a higher incidence of blood clots, and understanding the pathological pathways that lead to blood clot formation (thrombogenesis) is critical. Current methods of reporting thrombogenesis-related fluid dynamic metrics for patient-specific anatomies are based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, which can take weeks to months for a single patient. In this paper, we propose a ML-based method for rapid thrombogenesis prediction in the carotid artery of Covid-19 patients. Our proposed system aims
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