BACKGROUND Atrial fibrillation (AF) is recognized as a common complication of open cardiac surgery, occurring in up to 65% of patients. The advancing age and increasing risk profile of patients receiving aortic valve replacement (AVR) surgery is expected to raise incidence of new-onset postoperative AF resulting in potentially higher risk of adverse outcomes. In the early postoperative course, ...

The authors examined the relation of narrowed retinal arteriolar diameters, a marker of hypertensive damage, to mortality in a population-based cohort of 4,926 persons aged 43-84 years living in Wisconsin. A computer-assisted method was used to measure retinal vessel diameters from digitized retinal photographs taken at the baseline examination (1988-1990). These measurements were summarized as...

Surgical procedures involving heart and liver are rare and have been limited to either combined heart and liver transplantation or coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) or aortic valve surgery and orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). Aortic valve replacement (AVR) and pulmonary valve vegetectomy for bacterial endocarditis after OLT have also been reported. There are only five cases wit...

Recent studies of three-dimensional architecture of rat renal inner medulla (IM) and expression of membrane proteins associated with fluid and solute transport in nephrons and vasculature have revealed structural and transport properties that likely impact the IM urine concentrating mechanism. These studies have shown that 1) IM descending thin limbs (DTLs) have at least two or three functional...

Rapid deployment (RD) aortic valve replacement (AVR) using the Edwards Intuity Elite Valve System is a significant breakthrough in advancement comparison with other current conventional sutured surgical AVR. This study aimed to analyse early experiences this novel bioprosthesis. 60-month prospective study, between July 2017 and 2022, found that 59 patients had RD bioprosthesis implanted at inst...

Trans-apical aortic valve replacement (AVR) is a new and rapidly growing therapy. However, there are only few training opportunities. The objective of our work is to build an appropriate artificial model of the heart that can replace the use of animals for surgical training in trans-apical AVR procedures. To reduce the necessity for fluoroscopy, we pursued the goal of building a translucent mod...

Aortic stenosis (AS) occurs in almost 10% of adults over age 80 years with a mortality about 50% at 2 years unless outflow obstruction is relieved by aortic valve replacement (AVR). Development of AS is associated with anatomic, clinical and genetic risk factors including a bicuspid valve in 50%; clinical factors that include older age, hypertension, smoking, diabetes and elevated serum lipopro...

Aortic valve replacement (AVR) is a treatment of choice for patients with symptomatic severe aortic stenosis (AS). However, a significant proportion of these patients do not undergo surgical AVR due to high-risk features. Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) has emerged as an alternative for patients with severe AS who are not candidates for open-heart surgery. Since the introduction ...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the safety and the clinical outcomes of aortic valve replacement (AVR) performed with minimally invasive extracorporeal circulation (miniECC) technique vs. standard cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). From February 2006 to December 2007 a total of 181 isolated AVR were performed, of these 53 patients were operated using minimal extracorporeal circulation syst...

This paper is mainly about a new robot control system, which has open structures, and whose architecture is based on CAN bus for a joint modular robot. The hardware system of the joint control module is designed for signal sampling and processing, data storage and communication. ATmega64 SCM is selected as the core processor. A CAN card is used for communication. FM256 RAM is used for data stor...