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June 18, 2013 WBURSmartphone apps can help count calories or detect a heart attack. People are embracing them to manage many aspects of their health. But medical apps are largely unregulated now, so there's no easy way to be sure which ones are trustworthy and which ones aren't.

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May 31, 2013 KHNLocal officials in Washington D.C., are on the verge of approving two high-tech radiation facilities for treating cancer at a total cost of $153 million. The treatment these hospitals would offer costs twice as much as standard radiation, but hasn't been shown to work any better for most cancers.

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May 24, 2013 Treatments with drugs and implanted devices have made it much less likely that people with heart failure will die suddenly. But this chronic disease is still a common killer, researchers say.

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May 23, 2013 A 3-D printer is being credited with helping to save an Ohio baby's life, after doctors "printed" a tube to support a weak airway that caused him to stop breathing. The innovative procedure has allowed Kaiba Gionfriddo, of Youngstown, Ohio, to stay off a ventilator for more than a year.

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February 8, 2013 Clearing the blocked artery of a stroke patient with a device snaked through the blood vessel was thought to salvage threatened brain cells and prevent disability. But multiple studies are casting doubt on that conclusion.

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January 16, 2013 Smartphone apps that assess moles for skin cancer risk missed threatening moles one-third of the time, say dermatologists who tested some of the apps. The apps could give people a false sense of security about their skin.

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December 10, 2012 The barbs on porcupine quills help them pierce the skin. If the bumpy needles work so well for the big rodents, couldn't they they also help doctors and nurses giving injections? Designers of medical devices are looking to try the porcupine approach.

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October 7, 2012 Spinal Elements, a small and growing company, had long made plates, screws and other technology used in spinal surgeries. But its new Hero Allograft was the first product it ever made from the tissue — in this case the bones — of a donated human cadaver.

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September 27, 2012 Using silicon, magnesium and a special type of silk, scientists have created electronic circuits that dissolve in liquid. Electronics like these could be useful in future implantable medical devices.

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September 21, 2012 In the British TV sensation, a servant's attempt to correct a debilitating limp with a dubious device ends in blood and disappointment. Despite tighter regulation over the years, quack devices remain a threat.

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July 30, 2012 About 1 in 500 people has a concave chest wall, a condition known as pectus excavatum, or sunken chest. A new experimental procedure could provide an alternative to painful and invasive surgeries for children.

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May 28, 2012 KQEDHeart implants supply doctors with data that can tell them a lot about a patient's health. But that information isn't directly available to patients. Now some patients are on a mission to get faster access to information about their hearts.

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May 25, 2012 Jet injectors have been delivering drugs and vaccines without needles since the Star Trek era, but never caught on widely in real-world medicine. A device developed at MIT promises to change that, with computer-controlled precision and an injection as inconspicuous as a mosquito's jab.

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