Subsequently to the publication of this article, the authors have realized that an address affiliation associated with certain of the authors had been omitted. The authors' affiliation information should have appeared as follows (the omitted address affiliation is featured in bold): Hai Liu1-3*, Guangxian Chen1,2*, Hongsheng Zheng4*, Han Qin1,2, Mengya Liang1,2, Kangni Feng1,2 and Zhongkai Wu1,2 1Second Department of Cardiac Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University; 2Key Laboratory on Assisted Circulation, Ministry of Health, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510080; 3Third Department of Cardiac Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan 450052; 4Department of Cardiac Surgery, Henan Provincial Chest Hospital, Zhengzhou, Henan 450008, P.R. China. *Contributed equally. The authors regret this error in the affiliations, and apologize for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in the Molecular Medicine Reports 14: 4232-4242, 2016; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2016.5776].