RACAB may be a valuable alternative for patients requiring single or simple multi-vessel coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Although the mid-term mortality outcomes are similar, RACAB improves short-term outcomes and mid-term MACCE-free survival compared with MIDCAB.

A high discordance of driver mutations between tumors in individual patients and a favorable prognosis were identified in patients with multiple primary lung cancers diagnosed by clinical-pathologic criteria, which support different strategies from those with metastatic disease.

SUMMARYIn this paper, we propose a robust tracking control scheme for a class of uncertain strict-feedback nonlinear systems. In these systems, the control signal is quantized by a class of sector-bounded quantizers including the well-known hysteresis quantizer and logarithmic quantizer. Compared with the existing results in input-quantized control, the proposed scheme can control systems with non-global Lipschitz nonlinearities and unmatched uncertainties caused by model uncertainties and external disturbances. It is shown that the designed robust controller ensures global boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop system and enables the tracking error to converge toward a residual, which can be made arbitrarily small.

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Articular cartilage has restricted self-regenerative capacity; therefore, treatment of cartilage lesions is a great challenge in the field of orthopedics. In the present study, we evaluate the enhancing effect of a transforming growth factor-beta 1 (TGF-β1)-immobilized scaffold, fabricated by incorporating TGF-β1-loaded gelatin microspheres into PLGA framework, on the differentiation of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) into chondrocytes. Significant increase in cell proliferation was observed in the TGF-β1-immobilized PLGA-gelatin scaffold, as compared with the ASC-seeded non-TGF-β1-immobilized PLGA-gelatin scaffold. When chondrogenic differentiation of ASCs was evaluated for both constructs, sulfated glycosaminoglycan (sGAG) content was significantly higher in the TGF-β1-immobilized scaffold. This study showed that ASCs containing the TGF-β1-immobilized scaffold better promoted cartilage regeneration in defective articular cartilage, which is assessed by histological observation. Based on the above results, we conclude that TGF-β1-immobilized PLGA-gelatin scaffold seeded with ASCs considerably enhances the quality of the tissue-engineered cartilage, therefore, advancing the field of cartilage tissue engineering.