VIDEO GAMES MAY HELP SURGEONS...

By ANDRÉ PICARD
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTER
UPDATED AT 9:13 AM EDT Friday, Apr. 9, 2004

Parents take heart: All those hours your children seemingly waste playing video games may pay off handsomely down the road. New research suggests that there is a strong correlation between video-game experience and proficiency at laparoscopic surgery, which involves a video screen and instruments guided by joysticks.
James Rosser, director of minimally invasive surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made 37 per cent fewer mistakes during surgery and completed procedures 27 per cent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.
"I use the same hand-eye co-ordination to play video games as I use for surgery," Dr. Rosser said. At 49, he has played video games for decades and said the "long experience" has paid dividends. The surgeon said video games improve hand-eye co-ordination, reaction time, and spatial visualization skills, all of which are essential in laparoscopic surgery.
His personal favourite is Super Monkey Ball, a game in which the player shoots a ball into a confined goal. Dr. Rosser said the same manoeuvring required to get the ball in the net is needed to "go into a body and sew two pieces of intestine together."
The study was presented at a conference entitled Medicine Meets Virtual Reality, held in Newport Beach, Calif. Psychologist Douglas Gentile, director of the U.S. National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, said the study sends a message that video games are not all bad and, if used correctly, they can be excellent teaching tools.
"These findings confirm what we have long suspected -- video games are natural teachers, and many of the things taught, both positive and negative, are unintended by the game designers. "This is why parents need to pay attention to the types of games their children play," he said, stressing that kids who want to hone their future surgical skills need not do so playing gory, violent games.
Paul Lynch, a research associate at Beth Israel who has been studying the effects of video games on the brain for 14 years, was also intrigued by the results. He believes that video-game playing can actually develop neural pathways in the brain that will bolster skills in a number of areas.
"With all the negative effects that video games have on children, it's nice to see that video games have some positive attributes," he said.
Dr. Lynch said the study "landmarks the arrival of Generation X into medicine" and demonstrates that video games will play an increasingly important role in training health professionals in the future. In fact, Dr. Rosser has developed a laparoscopic skills and suturing teaching program called Top Gun that is essentially a video game.
Laparoscopic surgery, also known as keyhole surgery, consists of making three or four keyhole-size incisions and then sending a small video camera (laparoscope) and tiny surgical instruments into the openings. The surgeon then manoeuvres the instruments using joysticks, while watching on a video screen. The study involved 33 subjects, including 12 physicians and 21 medical-student residents. Their fine motor skills, reaction time and hand-eye co-ordination were tested using Top Gun and three other video games.