Surgery Simulator – Gamers Could Become Highly-skilled Surgeons

It is said that young generation is wasting too much time on playing computer games or consoles, that statement could be totally wrong as gamers could become highly-skilled surgeons. Believe it?

UMTB (University of Texas Medical Branch) has the leading robotic surgery department in the America. They have proven that the hand-eye coordination skills that gamers got from joystick-based gaming are what they need to master the robotic surgery tools.

A group of surgeons, led by Dr. Kilic, wanted to figure out the relationship between gamers and future surgeons. Therefore, they did a study to compare the performance of high school (who spend at least 2 hours in front of consoles everyday) and college gamers with medial residents on their surgery simulator. The research is very important these days because robotic surgery has been implemented but they don’t know how to train physicians.

The study was taken on 20 different skills and result is pretty amazing. The performance of students is equal and sometimes better than UTMB physicians. Dr. Kilic explained that this is the result of the technologically-savvy world that the students immersed in while physicians have never learnt those skills in medical schools. Watch this video to get more details on the study.

We are not sure that gamers could get a job in training physicians or operating actual surgeries yet. However, at least they have the right to say spending hours gaming is not useless at all.