Background: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems.Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study.Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students. A self-administered questionnaire was prepared to evaluate the newly applied teaching system. The study analysis included simple descriptive analysis and determining association through t-test, chi square test and regression analysis and using structural equation models to determine simultaneous association between different students’ demographic characteristics and potential predictors using SPSS-20 and Amos software at a significance level of < 0.05.Results:A total of 131 undergraduate medical students participated in the study with a response rate of 94%. The majority (93%) have indicated that PBL strategy contributed effectively to their knowledge development with a similar majority (92%) considering PBL successful new teaching method. About 86% reported that would choose PBL rather than conventional method and also 86% would advise PBL for others. Similarly, high majority indicated that various PBL activities are essential. Regarding the tutors’ role in PBL, the majority (92%) indicated that this role was positive and fundamental. According to two thirds (68%) of participants PBL application in Kerbala Medical college was very good application while a higher majority described various PBL sessions as successful and positive and fundamental role of tutors was stressed by most students.Conclusions: This study highlighted the benefits of soliciting student impressions of effective small group teaching. The students’ emphasized group atmosphere and facilitation skills of tutor in learning.Key words: Problem Based Learning, Medical Education, Small Group Teaching, Team Based Learning, Kerbala Medical College
Prediction of daily rainfall is important for flood forecasting, reservoir operation, and many other hydrological applications. The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm is generally used for stochastic forecasting rainfall which is not capable to simulate unseen extreme rainfall events which become common due to climate change. A new model is developed in this study for prediction of daily rainfall for different lead times based on sea level pressure (SLP) which is physically related to rainfall on land and thus able to predict unseen rainfall events. Daily rainfall of east coast of Peninsular Malaysia (PM) was predicted using SLP data over the climate domain. Five advanced AI algorithms such as extreme learning machine (ELM), Bay
... Show MoreThis study depicts the removal of Manganese ions (Mn2+) from simulated wastewater by combined electrocoagulation/ electroflotation technologies. The effects of initial Mn concentration, current density (C.D.), electrolysis time, and different mesh numbers of stainless steel screen electrodes were investigated in a batch cell by adopting Taguchi experimental design to explore the optimum conditions for maximum removal efficiency of Mn. The results of multiple regression and signal to noise ratio (S/N) showed that the optimum conditions were Mn initial concentration of 100 ppm, C.D. of 4 mA/cm2, time of 120 min, and mesh no. of 30 (wire/inch). Also, the relative significance of each factor was attained by the analysis
... Show MoreThis study depicts the removal of Manganese ions (Mn2+) from simulated wastewater by combined electrocoagulation/ electroflotation technologies. The effects of initial Mn concentration, current density (C.D.), electrolysis time, and different mesh numbers of stainless steel screen electrodes were investigated in a batch cell by adopting Taguchi experimental design to explore the optimum conditions for maximum removal efficiency of Mn. The results of multiple regression and signal to noise ratio (S/N) showed that the optimum conditions were Mn initial concentration of 100 ppm, C.D. of 4 mA/cm2, time of 120 min, and mesh no. of 30 (wire/inch). Also, the relative significance of each factor was attained by the analysis of variance (ANO
... Show MoreRegarding to the computer system security, the intrusion detection systems are fundamental components for discriminating attacks at the early stage. They monitor and analyze network traffics, looking for abnormal behaviors or attack signatures to detect intrusions in early time. However, many challenges arise while developing flexible and efficient network intrusion detection system (NIDS) for unforeseen attacks with high detection rate. In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) approach was proposed for anomaly detection NIDS. Dropout is the regularized technique used with DNN model to reduce the overfitting. The experimental results applied on NSL_KDD dataset. SoftMax output layer has been used with cross entropy loss funct
... Show MoreDetection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with
... Show MoreRetinopathy of prematurity (ROP) can cause blindness in premature neonates. It is diagnosed when new blood vessels form abnormally in the retina. However, people at high risk of ROP might benefit significantly from early detection and treatment. Therefore, early diagnosis of ROP is vital in averting visual impairment. However, due to a lack of medical experience in detecting this condition, many people refuse treatment; this is especially troublesome given the rising cases of ROP. To deal with this problem, we trained three transfer learning models (VGG-19, ResNet-50, and EfficientNetB5) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the zones of ROP in preterm newborns. The dataset to train th
Clinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b
Text categorization refers to the process of grouping text or documents into classes or categories according to their content. Text categorization process consists of three phases which are: preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. In comparison to the English language, just few studies have been done to categorize and classify the Arabic language. For a variety of applications, such as text classification and clustering, Arabic text representation is a difficult task because Arabic language is noted for its richness, diversity, and complicated morphology. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and a comparison for researchers in the last five years based on the dataset, year, algorithms and the accuracy th
... Show MoreBackground: The socioeconomic is important factor that effect in the severity and prevalence of most predominant and wide spread oral disease named dental caries, since this oral disease effects children, adolescents, adults and elderly peoples especially in developing countries as in Iraq.This survey was aimed to investigate the prevalence and severity of dental caries in relation to socioeconomic status. Materials and Methods: This oral health survey was conducted among primary and secondary school students aged 12 years old in Dewanyiah governorate in Iraq. The total sample composed of 804 (401 boys and 403 girls) selected randomly from different schools in Dewanyiah governorate. Diagnosis and recording of dental caries was assessed ac
... Show More