About the Authors

Caihua Xu

Contributed equally to this work with: Caihua Xu, Chen Wu

Affiliation Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Soochow, Jiangsu, China

Chen Wu

Contributed equally to this work with: Caihua Xu, Chen Wu

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Yang Xia

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Zhaopeng Zhong

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Xiang Liu

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Jing Xu

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Fei Cui

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

Bin Chen

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Wuxi NO.2 People’s Hospital, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China

Oluf Dimitri Røe

Affiliation Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine (IKM), Faculty of Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

Aihong Li

Affiliation Department of Medical Biosciences, Clinic chemistry, Umea University, Umea, Sweden

Yijiang Chen

YJChen@NJMU.edu.cn

Affiliation Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: CX CW AL. Performed the experiments: CX CW. Analyzed the data: CX YX ZZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YC XL JX FC BC. Wrote the paper: CX ODR.