Proving that children and the elderly are not the only groups seeing benefits from Nintendo's Wii, a study on a small group of surgeons who had practiced gaming with a modified controller showed them to achieve significantly more improvement on a standard simulator procedure than did a corresponding group of control subjects. Study author Kanav Kahol worked with Dr. Marshall Smith of the Banner Health hospital chain to build a special Wiimote attachment (read: broken golf club add on + laparoscopic probe) that eight surgical residents used to play Marble Mania and the full suite of Wii Play games. The gamers were then pitted against eight of their less-fortunate colleagues in a computer-simulated laparoscopic procedure, and managed to attain 48% higher scores, on average, than the non-gamers. Unfortunately, games involving broader motions such as tennis or boxing are said to be less suitable for this sort of training, make a total liar out of your doctor the next time you catch him "honing up on the latest techniques" by playing Wii Golf.

[Image courtesy of The Wall Street Journal]

Hearing that a cellphone saved someone's life isn't exactly surprising these days, but it was the manner in which a bundle of handsets enabled doctors to continue on in a recent operation that differentiated this one from the rest. Reportedly, the backup generators at the Policlinico Juan D. Peron hospital in Argentina failed to activate after the power went out whilst an appendix surgery was ongoing, but rather than panicking, a family member gathered up a number of phones in order to provide enough light for the surgeons and anesthetists to keep on keepin' on. According to the hospital director, the operation went on without proper lighting for no more than 20 minutes, but thanks to the beaming LCDs, the fellow under the knife came through just fine.

[Via Switched, image courtesy of foto8]

According to a new study published in the Archives of Surgery, surgeons who put in their downtime playing video games proved to have considerably higher surgical skills than their non-gamer co-workers, in particular when it came to laparoscopic surgery, which involves manipulating instruments while staring at a monitor. While the study is far from authoritative, with only 33 surgeons participating in it, it nonetheless found that those who played video games for at least three hours a week performed 27 percent faster, made 37 percent fewer errors, and scored 42 percent better in surgical tests than those who had not played video games. The correlation between video games and surgical skills was apparently so high that it proved to be an even greater indicator of performance than either the length of an individual's surgical training or their prior experience with laporscopic surgery. No word if those that snuck in some extra practice in Trauma Center on their DS had an even bigger advantage.