Cuan M Harrington, Vishwa Chaitanya, Patrick Dicker, Oscar Traynor, Dara Kavanagh. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
Background: Video-gaming demands elements of visual attention, hand-eye coordination and depth perception which may be contiguous with laparoscopic skill development. General video gaming has demonstrated altered cortical-plasticity and improved baseline/acquisition of minimally invasive skills. The present study aimed to evaluate for skill acquisition associated with a commercially-available dedicated laparoscopic video-game (Underground) and its unique (laparoscopic-like) controller for the Nintendo® Wii UTM console.
Methods and Procedures: This single blinded randomized controlled study was conducted with twenty laparoscopically naive student volunteers of limited (<3hours/week) videogaming backgrounds. Baseline laparoscopic skills were assessed using four basic tasks on the Virtual Reality (VR) simulator (LAP MentorTM,3D systems,Colorado,USA). Participants were randomized to two groups; Group A were requested to complete five hours of video-gaming (Underground) per week and Group B were to avoid gaming beyond their normal frequency. After four weeks participants were reassessed using the same VR tasks. Changes in simulator performances were assessed for each group and for intragroup variances using mixed model regression.
Results: Significant inter and intragroup performances were present for the video-gaming and control group across the four basic tasks. The video-gaming group demonstrated significant improvements in thirty-one of the metrics examined including dominant (p≤0.004) and non-dominant (p<0.050) instrument movements, pathlengths (p≤0.040), time taken (p≤0.021) and end score (p≤0.046, [task-dependent]). The control group demonstrated improvements in fourteen of these measures. The video-gaming group demonstrated significant (p<0.05) improvements compared to the control in five metrics. Despite encouraged game-play and the console in participants’ domiciles, voluntary engagement was lower than directed due to factors including: game enjoyment (33.3%), lack of available time (22.2%) and entertainment distractions (11.1%).
Conclusion: Our work revealed significant value in training using a dedicated laparoscopic videogame for acquisition of virtual laparoscopic skills. This novel serious-game may provide foundations for future surgical developments on games consoles in the home environment.
Presented at the SAGES 2017 Annual Meeting in Houston, TX.
Abstract ID: 85196
Program Number: P301
Presentation Session: iPoster Session (Non CME)
Presentation Type: Poster