Those countless hours you spend playing video or computer games may actually pay off for you someday. Your awesome "skills" could even help you save a life. Pretty cool, huh? A surgeon in my latest UT HealthLeader article, TORS: New Life-Saving Robotic Surgery, uses a controller similar to a video game controller to manipulate tiny surgical instruments into tight spaces inside the throat, where a surgeon’s hands just can’t fit. The technology lets surgeons go through the mouth instead of cutting through the neck, and remove cancerous tumors.
“The robot helps us be minimally invasive, and to do many things with minimal interruption,” says Ron Karni, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School. Karni performs the surgery at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston. “It works just like a video game,” he adds.
The robot transmits images of the throat to a computer screen, above the patient. The surgeon watches the screen while guiding the instruments with a controller—like an intensely focused gamer.
Karni estimates the cure rate for throat cancer using TORS to be close to 90 percent, compared to the 60 to 70 percent with traditional chemotherapy and radiation alone.
Those are pretty good odds.
And the odds that playing Wii will get my children into medical school?
Slim.
I'm putting my money on Xbox.