Dr. Sami Kilic oversees doctors training to become surgeons at a hospital in Galveston, Texas, and he’s also the parent of a teenage boy. Like many parents, Kilic is concerned about how much time his son spends playing videogames. But now he’s also worried that his resident physicians aren’t playing them enough.

According to a study by Kilic and others at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, doling out death in the virtual world of first-person-shooter games might help the next generation of surgeons save lives in the real world. The study, presented at a meeting of the American Gynecologic Laparoscopists in Las Vegas in November, used simulators to compare the robotic surgery skills of med school residents against college and high school students who spend a lot of their time playing videogames — and the videogamers won.

Robotic surgery — where robotic machinery helps surgeons perform certain tasks through very small incisions — is growing rapidly, despite the criticism that these procedures are expensive and may not be any more safe than traditional minimally invasive operations. In recent years, around 75 percent of all prostate cancer surgeries are now done with Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical Systems machines, according to the company (.pdf).

Intuitive Surgical – which currently enjoys a monopoly on robotic surgery equipment — also reports (.pdf) that there was a 29 percent increase in robotic-assisted surgeries from 2010 to 2010, and the number climbed another 24 percent from 2011 to 2012. For better or worse, the next generation of surgeons will likely need to learn to operate robotic equipment.

Read the complete article at Wired.

For heart patients, signing up to implant a pacemaker in your chest isn’t casual choice. Nevertheless, the technology has saved numerous lives over the years. This week a new development was unveiled that uses a similar device to treat to Alzheimer’s patients with what’s essentially a pacemaker for the brain.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have announced the first successful implantation of a pacemaker-like device that delivers deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a means for reversing cognitive degeneration and memory loss caused by Alzheimer’s. The treatment is more commonly used on patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

Read the complete article at DVice.

Researchers have created a new artificial lens, made up of thousands of nanoscale polymer layers, that’s almost identical to the lens in a human eye.

As well as the obvious medical applications, it could be used in consumer vision products and even ground and aerial surveillance technology.

The lens is based on a new technology called GRIN, or gradient refractive index optics. In GRIN, light gets bent, or refracted, by varying degrees as it passes through a lens or other transparent material – unlike traditional lenses, which bend light using their surface shape or single index of refraction.

Read the complete article at TG Daily.

Advanced age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the U.S. in adults over the age of 60. It affects nearly 2 million people in the U.S., with half a million new cases diagnosed every year. It’s a big problem. And until recently, we didn’t have a very good way of treating it. Patients with end-stage degeneration typically had to rely on cumbersome, low-tech solutions to help them see–relics like handheld magnifying glasses and closed-circuit televisions. But earlier this month, a team of surgeons at the UC Davis Eye Center introduced a promising new solution: a tiny, implantable telescope.

To get a sense of how it works, you have to understand the malady it’s intended to treat. As macular degeneration worsens, scarring in the eye creates a foggy black spot in the center of the patient’s vision. The new implant magnifies the image entering the eye two to three times, projecting a larger image onto the scarred macula and thus reducing the size of the blind spot relative to whatever the patient’s looking at. Before, where a patient with AMD might have had a black spot that obscured the entire face of a loved one, rendering them unrecognizable, the telescope magnifies the face so the black spot only takes up a portion of it. It’s not a solution to AMD so much as a workaround for it.

Read the complete article at Fast Design.

A two-year old British girl born severely deaf due to a developmental disorder has spoken her first word after receiving a bionic ear.

The medical team led by Dr. Vittorio Colletti, the leading surgeon for installing ear implants in pediatric patients, performed the surgery on Evie Small last June in Verona, Italy. After recovering from swelling in her brain after the surgery, the device was turned on a month later.

In just two weeks, Evie heard her first sound and was able to clearly repeat her mother saying “mumma”.

More than simply enabling her to hear, the device is key to her cognitive development, ability to speak, and otherwise lead a healthy life in a world full of sound. That’s because the bionic ear isn’t a hearing aid — it’s an electronic auditory implant that plugs directly into her tiny brainstem.

Read the complete article at Singularity Hub.

A blind woman can now see spots of light after being implanted with an early prototype bionic eye, confirming the potential of the world-first technology.

Australian researchers have been working for years to develop the bionic eye, in which electrodes are inserted into the retina of vision-impaired patients.

Dianne Ashworth, 54, was the first patient fitted with the device in surgery at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in May.