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Qiaoxiang Yin,1 Zhiyong Pei,2 Heng Wang,3 Yusheng Zhao4 1Department of Geriatric Cardiology, Chinese General Hospital of the Air Force, 2Department of Geriatric Cardiology, Beijing Military General Hospital, 3Department of Neurology, Chinese General Hospital of the Air Force, 4Institute of Geriatric Cardiology, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, People’s Republic of China Abstract: Treatment of myocardial infarction (MI) with adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) has produced promising results. Cyclosporine A (CsA) inhibits apoptosis by preventing the opening of mitochondrial permeability transition pores. A CsA nanoparticle emulsion (CsA-NP) has lower toxicity and higher efficiency as compared to CsA. In this study, we hypothesized that a combination of ASCs and CsA-NP would enhance the therapeutic efficiency in a swine MI model. MI was induced in pig hearts by occlusion of the left anterior descending artery. The animals that survived MI were divided into four groups and 1 week later received intracoronary ASCs (ASCs, n=6), intracoronary culture media in combination with CsA-NP (CsA-NP, n=6), intracoronary ASCs in combination with CsA-NP (ASCs + CsA-NP, n=6), or remained untreated (control, n=4). Animals were sacrificed 8 weeks later and were evaluated for cardiac function by delayed-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging and immunohistopathology. We observed that the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was significantly increased in the ASCs + CsA-NP group, compared to the CsA-NP group (53.6%±2.4% versus 48.6%±1.5%, P

Owing to external disturbances, parameter uncertainty, and measurement noise, it has been a challenging task to develop an appropriate controller for the automated clutch system. This paper proposes a new method for electromechanical clutch position control systems. First, a non-linear dynamic model for the screw-nut actuator associated with a clutch is derived, and then a dynamic sliding-mode controller with fuzzy adaptive tuning is developed. The fuzzy adaptive tuning arithmetic is used to improve the robustness and stability of the controller. At the same time, the chattering phenomenon is alleviated by adopting the proposed controller. Based on dSPACE and MATLAB-Simulink, the rapid control prototyping of the automated clutch is used as a method to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm. © Authors 2010.