JoeTheBro said:
Because it's horrible science! They took a random group that had no experience doing the procedure and had them try the simulator. Next they gave half of them a Wii. Do you know what that Wii taught them? To be slow! They are simply taking their time verse the control group. They are also still horrible at it! |
The metric here is not actually time it's % improvement (the table is labelled poorly) so higher numbers are better. They specifically state in the text that the Wii group showed improvements in time. It would be very strange to refer to slowed performance as improvement, all other things being equal fast surgery is good surgery. "Horrible' science typically refers to poor methods with dubious conclusions and there is not enough information presented here to draw such conclusions about the quality of this study.
This study certainly doesn't prove that playing Wii makes the best surgeons better but it might help those who are starting out. The key point here is that laparascopic surgery is typically a two person job. The primary surgeon and an assistant, the assistant doesn't need to be able to do much initially (e.g. medical students and junior residents would be fine for many simple procedures) but a bit of hand eye coordination would certainly help.
The assistant is typically the person who 'drives' the camera which is inserted through the umbilicus and then pivots about that point. So essentially your camera has the videogame equivalent of inverted controls. The assistants job is to ensure, at the minimum, that the camera is always centred on whatever the primary surgeon is working on. Once the assistant is competent at driving the camera they can further assist by manipulating some instruments with their other hand to help clamp, hold, retract etc. So essentially you are working with two controls, one in each hand; one that controls what you are looking at and a second independent set of controls used for manipulation at the point of focus.
Once again I can't comment on the quality of this study without reading more but it's not very hard to imagine that experience using Wii controls could confer confer some benefit on untrained surgeons.
