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Today's gamer, tomorrow's surgeon?

Researchers hope video games can attract youths to medical careers.

By Damon Adams, amednews staff. May 3, 2004.

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It started with a simple blip on a screen. James "Butch" Rosser Jr., MD, was introduced to the dawn of the video game era, and he was hooked.

"I started with Pong in the student union building at the University of Mississippi [in 1973]. It just took off from there. I went through Intellivision, Atari, and it went on and on."

Now a laparoscopic surgeon in New York, Dr. Rosser began to wonder whether there might be a link between video game prowess and surgical skills. He conducted a study that found physicians who played video games at least three hours a week made 37% fewer errors in laparoscopic surgery than those who don't play video games. Video gamers also performed their surgical task 27% quicker than those who aren't players.

Dr. Rosser, who announced his findings in April, said being a good surgeon requires some of the same skills as being a good video game player, including spatial visualization and hand-eye coordination.

The link also makes sense, he said, because a laparoscopic surgeon watches an external video screen to perform surgery and maneuvers joysticks to control surgical tools in the patient's body.

He thinks video games could be used to attract Generation Xers and minorities to medicine.

"We can maybe recruit individuals not only into the surgical field, but to embrace science-related endeavors as well," said Dr. Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery and director of the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.