Trainee surgeons are turning to game consoles to hone their scalpel skills. A study has found that students become more proficient at making the delicate and smooth movements needed in surgery after playing certain computer games.

Mark Marshall, director of simulation and training at the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre, in Phoenix, Arizona, asked eight trainee doctors to spend an hour playing games on a console before "performing surgery" in virtual reality - using a software system that recreates, on the computer screen, a human body in 3D and monitors surgeons' hands as they "operate" electronically.

By recording the precision of the trainees' hand movements, Marshall's team could judge how good each was at a variety of procedures that would be used in real operations.

The researchers found that the students scored better at practice operations after playing games on Nintendo's Wii console, an effect attributed to the wireless controllers used to direct the onscreen action.

The fine control needed to move a virtual marble around a 3D maze in one game was particularly applicable to laparoscopy, a form of keyhole surgery.

Students, Marshall pointed out, could now be practising "long before they get near the patients".

Marshall found that the games players scored 48% higher than other trainees who had not practised on the 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."

Researchers said it was crucial for the trainees to be given particular exercises to focus on while playing the games, and that not all games helped hone surgery skills.

"You don't gain a lot from swinging an imaginary tennis racket," Kanav Kohel, another researcher on the project, told New Scientist magazine. "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."

Marshall said the games consoles were cheap enough to be used to train surgeons in poorer countries where cutting-edge virtual reality systems were not available. The Marshall team is now designing software for the Wii that accurately simulates common surgical procedures. They are to announce their work at the Medicine meets Virtual Reality conference in Long Beach, California, this month.