Surgeons in training will increasingly be turning to video game consoles in order to hone their scalpel wielding skills, after a new study found that students are more proficient in making the delicate movements needed in surgery after playing specific games.

At the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, eight trainee doctors were asked to spend an hour playing video games on a console. After playing the games, surgeons "performed surgery" in virtual reality, utilizing a high-tech software system that recreates the human body in 3-D on a computer screen, and monitors the surgeons' hands as they conduct an operation electronically.

The virtual reality operation allowed Mark Marshall, director of simulation and training, to judge how good each of the surgeons were at a variety of procedures used in real-life operations.

What Marshall and his team of researchers found was that the students scored better in their virtual operations after playing games on the Nintendo Wii. They attribute the success to the wireless controllers that allow one to direct onscreen action.

It's important to note, however, that not every game had benefit to the surgeons.

"You don't gain a lot from swinging an imaginary tennis racket," said Kanav Kohel, another researcher on the project. "The whole point about surgery is to execute small, finely controlled movements with your hands, and that is exactly what you get with the Wii."

For example, the fine control needed to move a virtual marble around a 3-D maze in one game was particularly applicable to laparoscopy, a type of keyhole surgery. Researchers emphasized that trainees be given specific exercises to focus on while playing games, in particular ones that would relate to surgical skills, and fine, controlled movements.

The study also found out that those who played the Wii games scored 48% higher than those who had not practiced on the game console first.

"Our trial shows this improves the skills of the surgeons when they are told to pick exercises within the games. It makes their training much, much quicker. How long depends on the surgical speciality, but usually it's somewhere between four to six years," said Marshall.

What this means is that surgeons can begin praticing and honing their skills long before they get near any patients with their scalpels. And because the Wii is cheap enough to use to train surgeons in poorer countries where they aren't able to afford cutting-edge virtual reality systems, Marshall and his team of researchers are now working on creating software for the Wii that will accurately simulate common surgical procedures.

Results of this study, which were mentioned briefly in the publication New Scientist, will be formally announced later this month at the Medicine meets Virtual Reality conference in Long Beach, California.