  We present predictions for heavy-quark production at the Large Hadron
Collider making use of the ${\overline{\rm MS}}$ and MSR renormalization
schemes for the heavy-quark mass as alternatives to the widely used on-shell
renormalization scheme. We compute single and double differential distributions
including QCD corrections at next-to-leading order and investigate the
renormalization and factorization scale dependence as well as the perturbative
convergence in these mass renormalization schemes. The implementation is based
on publicly available programs, ${\texttt{MCFM}}$ and ${\texttt{xFitter}}$,
extending their capabilities. Our results are applied to extract the top-quark
mass using measurements of the total and differential $t\bar{t}$ production
cross-sections and to investigate constraints on parton distribution functions,
especially on the gluon distribution at low $x$ values, from available LHC data
on heavy-flavor hadro-production.

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;High Energy Physics - Experiment