OBJECTIVES This study was undertaken to investigate time trends in early mortality, morbidity and clinical characteristics of patients undergoing heart valve surgery over the last decade. METHODS A regional, prospectively collected, study comprising all patients (2,327) undergoing valve surgery in a defined geographical area from January 1990 to December 1999 was conducted. Data were collecte...

Echo-phonocardiograms of 64 patients with multiple types of prosthetic mitral valves (PMV) were evaluated. Six patients demonstrated findings suggesting valve obstruction: four had surgical confirmation of prosthetic obstruction, one reduced cardiac output and pulmonary hypertension but no prosthetic dysfunction at surgery, and one is asymptomatic. Three of four patients with confirmed obstruct...

conclusions surgical repair of the congenital mv disease yields acceptable early and intermediate-term satisfactory valve function and good survival at intermediate-term follow-up. strong predictors for poor surgical outcome and death were age smaller than 1 year, weight smaller or equal than 6 kg, and associated cardiac anomalies such as pulmonary stenosis. objectives the aim of this study was...

Constrained Nonlinear Predictive Control of Gasoline Low-Temperature Combustion — Combustion of a gasoline fuel with a high amount of recirculated exhaust gas is increasingly gaining interest. Such in part load conditions, a low combustion peak temperature can be achieved, which yields lowest emissions but suffers from instabilities of the process and a highly nonlinear behavior. These properti...

BACKGROUND Advances in the understanding of mitral valve pathology have laid to mitral valve plasty (MPL) as the procedure of choice of all the mitral intervention as compared to mitral valve replacement (MVR). MATERIAL AND METHODS A cohort of 355 patients with mitral valve disease operated between January 1993 to January 2007 with closing date first of mars 2011. There were 214 MPL and 141 M...

OBJECTIVES We studied the acute effects of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) on functional mitral regurgitation in heart failure (HF) patients with left bundle branch block (LBBB). BACKGROUND Both an decrease [corrected] in left ventricular (LV) closing force and mitral valve tethering have been implicated as mechanisms for functional mitral regurgitation (FMR) in dilated hearts. We hyp...

Solenoid valves are a core component of most solution perfusion systems used in neuroscience research. As they open and close, they control the flow of solution through each perfusion line, thereby modulating the timing and sequence of chemical stimulation. The valves feature a ferromagnetic plunger that moves due to the magnetization of the solenoid and returns to its initial position with the...

State-of-the-art tissue engineered heart valves are not strong enough to withstand aortic blood pressure levels. When a strong and slowly degrading scaffold is used, the starting position of valvular tissue engineering is a stronger valve and seeded cells are allowed more time to create a strong extracellular matrix. A polycaprolactone knitted patch with leaflets was developed as a valvular sca...