Yes, that's what I am doing - practicing my manual dexterity skills Maybe soon video gaming will be a new class in medical school? Definitely more useful than some of this stuff

THE running joke that playfully follows Dr. James Clarence Rosser Jr. when he prepares to operate at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York is that this ebullient man possesses hands too large to perform traditional surgery.

Instead, Dr. Rosser prefers laparoscopic surgery, a technique that relies on an ultra-small video camera to help him manipulate long, slender instruments inserted into patients through small incisions. It is, he said recently, as his hulking 6-foot-4 frame loomed over a surgical simulator using instruments he designed, an elegantly efficient approach to repairing the human body.

The complex manual dexterity required to be a stellar video gamer and minimally invasive surgeon are strikingly similar, said Dr. Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery and director of the hospital's Advanced Medical Technology Institute. More important, he is using video games to help develop and train a new generation of surgeons who may have unwittingly acquired an aptitude for laparoscopic surgery while wiling away thousands of hours playing Mortal Kombat, BloodRayne and the like.

Dr. Rosser, 50, practices what he preaches. He keeps an Xbox, along with PlayStation 2 and GameCube consoles, just a few strides from the operating room so he can warm up with a favorite, Super Monkey Ball, just before surgery.

Last year Dr. Rosser was a co-author of a study that concluded that surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than surgeons who did not play video games.

Read more at the [1] NY Times.