Tech Shout!

A recent study conducted by Beth Israel Medical Center in New York jointly with the National Institute on Media and the Family, found that surgeons who played videogames before participating in a performance test involving laparoscopy tools completed the test more than 11 seconds faster than those doctors who didn’t play the games. The test is set up in such a way, so that mistakes add time, which means those who performed the tasks quicker made fewer mistakes.

Laparoscopy involves the use of long, thin instruments inserted through tiny incisions in the body to perform complicated procedures. Doctors watch their work on a television monitor that has images fed in from a small video camera which is among the surgical tools inserted in the patient’s body.

According to Dr. James Rosser, who is the lead researcher in this study, said that better performance might be the result of the similarities between the surgery and videogame play. Both these activities involve eye-hand coordination on instruments, while watching the TV screen. Other studies show that playing videogames release a chemical in the body called dopamine that develops neural pathways from the brain to the hands. The same pathways, in theory, could be used in surgeries involving similar skills. “The neural pathways laid down in playing videogames stay dormant until you perform similar tasks with similar instruments,” Rosser said. “That, in theory, is what happens.”

The purpose of the research is to find ways to reduce the number of surgical errors, which cause more than half of the 100,000 deaths each year in the United States due to medical errors. “If we can use something cheap and over the counter, like videogames to help surgeons, then we should be motivated to discover what we should use and how we should use it,” Rosser said.