Video Games Can Help Hone Surgeons' Skills
Surgeons who are whizzes at video games perform significantly faster and with fewer errors in laparoscopic surgical training than their nongaming colleagues. That's the conclusion of a new study in the Archives of Surgery. What's more, the physicians' years of training and number of actual laparoscopic surgeries under their belts did not significantly affect their performance.
Researchers tested 21 surgical residents and 12 attending surgeons at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City on the Rosser Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program (yes, it's actually called Top Gun), recording the time it took them to complete each task and the number of errors. Then the surgeons played three video games: Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2, LucasArts's Star Wars Racer Revenge, and Konami's Silent Scope. Scores for both Top Gun and the video games, say researchers, indicate an aptitude for fine motor control, quick reaction time, and two-dimensional depth perception—skills vital in keyhole surgery.
The results were telling. Surgeons who played video games for more than three hours a week in the past performed 42 percent better, made 37 percent fewer errors, and were 27 percent faster on Top Gun than the nonplayers. And high performance on the three video games was an even greater predictor of success on the Top Gun test than past gaming experience. "We need to implement a 'practice before you play' mentality, and I think using video games is a cost-effective platform to help promote surgical skills," says James Rosser Jr, the study's coauthor and chief of minimally invasive surgery at Albert Einstein School of Medicine. "It's also a great recruiting tool that the field hasn't considered yet."
But getting a high score on Super Monkey Ball may not necessarily mean a top-notch performance in the OR. Myriam Curet, a professor of surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine who wrote a critique of the study, cautions that "being a good laparoscopic surgeon requires more than being able to quickly and accurately finish a couple of drills." Judgment and experience are likely more critical to success, says Curet, and neither video games nor Top Gun tests those skills.