A prominent cardiologist is leaving the Cleveland Clinic to join Brigham and Women's Hospital and the VA Boston Healthcare System.

Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt (left), who had been associate director of the cardiovascular coordinating center at the Cleveland Clinic, will become director of the interventional cardiovascular program at the Brigham and chief of cardiology at VA Boston Healthcare. He will also become a senior investigator at the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction Study Group at the Brigham. He was an undergraduate at MIT, earned his medical degree at Cornell, and is working on a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Bhatt is the fifth cardiologist to leave the Cleveland Clinic over the last several months, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Brigham saw its own flurry of departures last year, some to competitors of the Cleveland Clinic, as this White Coat Notes story details.

“I had a wonderful time at the Cleveland Clinic, a fantastic place from which I would have been happy to retire," Bhatt said in a statement from the Brigham announcing his hiring. He called the opportunity at the Brigham and the VA Boston "too great an opportunity to pass up."

The state's medical school and a veterans' health center are joining forces.

The University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center will announce an academic affiliation tomorrow morning at an 11 a.m. news conference at the Bedford facility.

The two institutions said they plan to work together on patient care, education, and research.

Doctors are ordering tests to screen men for prostate cancer more often, even though there is no clear evidence that the blood tests reduce deaths related to the disease, according to a study by three Boston researchers. Younger men and African-American men had the biggest increases in testing, they found.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the United States, with 200,000 new cases expected by the end of 2007. About 12 percent of these men will die of the disease, the authors write in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

There have been no randomized clinical trials showing that the prostate specific antigen, or PSA, test has been effective in reducing that death rate, Dr. Wildon R. Farwell of the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System said in an interview. Yet primary care physicians were 50 percent more likely to order a PSA test during a clinical visit and three times more likely to order one during a preventive exam from 2000 to 2004 than during the previous five years, according to records of men 35 and older from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

More than a third of men with early-stage prostate cancer received treatment that didn’t fit their pre-existing problems with urinary, bowel or sexual function, Boston researchers report in a new study. They said their finding points to poor communication between doctors and patients.

“We found that the mismatches were more common than we figured,” Dr. James A. Talcott of Massachusetts General Hospital said in an interview. “For a single strong contraindication, one-third of patients ended up getting what appeared to be the wrong treatment.”

By Felicia Mello, Globe Correspondent

After losing a foot and part of a leg to a landmine during the invasion of Iraq, Garth Stewart is determined to keep active. The 24-year-old retired Army specialist makes time for jujitsu and boxing in between history classes at Columbia University in New York. Still, sometimes the artificial limb he uses can't keep up with his busy schedule.

"Your hip ends up doing so much work because it has to draw the foot forward," he said. "At the end of the day you have soreness in your back."

Hoping to help Stewart and others who have lost limbs walk more normally, a team of researchers from MIT, Brown University and the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center today unveiled the first motor-powered prosthetic foot. The computer-controlled appendage can relax or stiffen in response to changing terrain, propelling the wearer forward more quickly and reducing fatigue.

"The ankle kind of has a mind of its own," Stewart said in a telephone interview, after demonstrating the device in front of an audience of reporters and fellow amputees at the medical center. "At first I felt like it was fighting me, but once I got accustomed to the rhythm, it felt like having my leg back."