Video games serve a purpose after all; they may soon enter medical schools to help surgeons achieve dexterity and better eye-hand coordination.

……………………………………………..

The plot of the hugely popular video game Trauma Center: Under the Knife, created by Nintendo, revolves around a doctor who successfully operates on organ after organ to progress in the adventure. Depending on the time saved and the health of the patient following the surgery, the player is graded, as a top-notch Master Surgeon or a lowly Rookie Doctor, at the end of the game.

In real life, too, warming up a bit on the game console before stepping into an operation theatre may be a good idea for surgeons, particularly those conducting keyhole surgeries, believe scientists who studied how certain video games help doctors achieve dexterity and better eye-hand coordination at the operation table.

Douglas Gentile, a psychologist at Iowa State University, who presented a paper yesterday at the ongoing American Psychological Association annual meet in Washington DC, feels that video games are greatly underutilised in this regard. “To my knowledge, they are not being widely discussed as training tools,” Gentile told KnowHow.

“They could be far more cost effective, and can demonstrate far more variations, complications and recovery from errors in surgeries than traditional techniques,” Gentile observes. Gentile was involved in an earlier study which showed that laparoscopic surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 per cent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 per cent fewer errors than those who did not play these games.

Laparoscopy, a minimally invasive surgical process, involves making tiny keyhole incisions and inserting a mini video camera that sends images to an external video screen, while the surgical tools are remote controlled by the surgeon watching the screen. It can be performed on just about any part of the body, from the appendix to the colon and the gall bladder.

“While simulators based on video game technology may help surgeons improve their skills, I do not think it is an absolute necessity,” says Jaydip Bhadra Ray, a laparoscopic general surgeon at Apollo Gleneagles Hospital, Calcutta. In countries like India, aspiring medical students work as understudies to an accomplished surgeon for nearly five years, before they pick up the scalpel on their own, says Ray. Also an ardent video gamer, Ray, however, thinks it can impart certain skills to the surgeon who operates on a three-dimensional human body while looking at a monitor which is two-dimensional like a video game console.

Conventional simulators used by medical schools in the West cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such a technological approach is missing in countries like India. “I am yet to come across an Indian medical college that uses simulators for training surgeons,” says Ray.

Gentile, who earlier conducted studies on the impact of video games on the surgical skills of doctors together with James C. Rosser, head of minimally invasive surgery at the Beth Israel Medical Centre in the US, thinks that advanced video game skills and experience are significant predictors of surgical and suturing capabilities. The study, which appeared in the Journal of Surgery last year, looked at the agility and skills of 33 laparoscopic surgeons. Eighteen surgeons who played video games for three or more hours a week scored over others who never played video games in their life.

Rosser, on his part, has already developed a one-and-a-half-day course called Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program. He says: “I use the same hand-eye coordination to play video games as I use for surgery.”

Rosser thinks that practice with a video game can help develop timing, a sense of touch and an intuitive feel for manipulating devices. Besides, it offers a much cheaper way to train on those fine motor skills that surgeons employ in surgery.

Myriam Curet, a surgeon at the Stanford University Medical Centre, however, is not as enthusiastic as the others. In a critique on the Journal of Surgery paper, Curet argues that such motor skills are best developed from the age of 8 to 15 years, certainly not in a medical school. Describing video games as an “electronic babysitter,” Curet says there is a need to watch children’s video gaming carefully — the number of hours, the type of games and so on.

But Gentile thinks there is a broader picture. There are several dimensions on which games have effects, including for how long they are played, the content of each game and how you control motions. “This means that games are not merely ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but powerful education tools and may have many unexpected effects,” says Gentile.

So will video games move into medical schools to train the future generations of surgeons? That’s worth watching out for.

You may click to see :->

Serious Games challenging us to play a better education

Sources: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

Related articles by Zemanta

• US hospital using Wii as training tool for its surgeons
• ‘Wii warm-up’ good for surgeons
• Surgery kit firm’s ‘yes’ to Olympus
• Nintendo Wii Helps Surgeons Hone Motor Skills