The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century

Cuddihy, et al. "The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century."Archives of Surgery 142.2 (2007): 181-186. Brigham Young University-Scholar Search. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.

The authors of this article are affiliated with the departments of surgery in the Beth Israel Medical Center, New York University Medical Center, Montefiore Medical Center, Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University. In this article they hypothesize that there is a link between playing video games and laparoscopic surgical and suturing skills. To find out if this is true they designed an experiment that compared the correlation between the two. They also kept tract of other factors such as past video game experience, years of surgical training, number of years in practice, and the number of laparoscopic surgeries done. The result of the study revealed that there is a positive correlation between video game skill and laparoscopic surgical skills, meaning that the better a surgeon was at the video games played the more skillful they were on the operating table. They believe that "video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," and that video games may be good training tools for students in the medical field.