We have all played video games or tried some form of virtual reality at some point in our lives. While it may not sound like these types of games have much value beyond entertainment, and your mother may have said that they are even rotting your brain, VR and video games can also act as educational tools. Specifically, during the surgical training of medical students.
It has been found that the use of video game-style training for medical students improved their abilities in performing laparoscopic and robotic surgery. It makes sense that a video game would better prepare them for robotic surgery, because both of these mediums require user input, leading to a reaction from the technology you are interacting with, similarly to a video game.. Where you are inputting commands and expecting an avatar in the game to carry out those commands, just as a surgical robot would do, when a medical student performs actions during surgery.
Laparoscopic surgery is performed by making small holes in the patient’s body cavity and inserting a camera and the needed surgical instruments into these holes. The point is to be as noninvasive as possible during the surgery so that the surgeon does not have to open the patient up entirely to gain access to internal organs and tissues. Again, it makes sense that video games would better prepare students to perform this type of surgery because it requires a great sense for digital feedback that is removed and even sometimes delayed from the surgeon's direct view. It is very interesting how people can develop such a precise sense for physical inputs into a digital device. It would be interesting to learn more about how humans can become more comfortable with the translation of digital to physical and vice versa.
Learning the muscles and locomotion unit allowed me to better hypothesize about how we are able to translate these games to real-life procedures. After learning about how an action potential from the brain causes muscle contractions,, this allowed the article to be far more interesting because our body is creating precise movements/contractions such as playing a video game at a fast pace. It would be interesting to learn the physiology of muscle memory. I think this would make this article more full circle and allow me to better understand how repetition and practice lead to higher degrees of precision and skill.
Gupta A, Lawendy B, Goldenberg MG, Grober E, Lee JY, Perlis N. Can video games enhance surgical skills acquisition for medical students? A systematic review. Surgery. 2021 Apr;169(4):821-829. doi: 10.1016/j.surg.2020.11.034. Epub 2021 Jan 5. PMID: 33419578.
Hello Hannah,
ReplyDeleteReally great post on the introduction of technology into medical schools. This caught my attention as it reminds me of when my mom told me playing video games would not help me succeed in life. Joke’s on her! I was interested to see if there were types of video games that they used to measure effectiveness and data on how much improvement is actually measured. Using the Rosser Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program (Top Gun), residents and attending physicians scored 41% better, 39% faster, and making 47% fewer errors (Rosser et al., 2007). These numbers are clear indicators that video games do make physicians better, but it begs the question, could video games be used as an entrance qualification to surgical residencies (similar to flight schools), and does it make the case to push for more laparoscopic surgical interventions if outcomes are improved that drastically?
Just because I was interested, the following link is a video into what video games were actually being performed in the study: https://youtu.be/pp_VaqpT-yA
References:
Rosser JC Jr, Lynch PJ, Cuddihy L, Gentile DA, Klonsky J, Merrell R. The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century. Arch Surg. 2007 Feb;142(2):181-6; discusssion 186. doi: 10.1001/archsurg.142.2.181. PMID: 17309970.