DAVENPORT - By day, Bill Olson operates on gallbladders, colons, appendixes and stomachs.

By night, he takes on his 7-year-old triplets in battles contested via their PlayStation 3.

The Quad Cities general surgeon, who often uses less-invasive techniques known as laparoscopy, was not surprised by the findings of a study co-authored by an Iowa State University professor: Laparoscopic surgeons who play video games often are better at their craft.

He believes the opposite may be true, too.

"If you're good at laparoscopic surgery, you're probably good at video games," he said while explaining that his wife sometimes asks him to allow the kids to win every once in awhile.

In a study published in the February issue of the Archives of Surgery, psychologist Douglas Gentile and his colleagues found that laparoscopic surgeons who had played video games at least three hours a week made 37 percent fewer errors, were 27 percent faster and scored 42 percent better overall on a series of tests than their nonplaying colleagues.

Laparoscopic surgery uses a smaller incision. The surgical tools are inserted along with a camera, which projects what is happening inside the patient on a screen.

"What shocked me was that the past amount of video games" predicted performance, Gentile said, "better than how many years of training they had, better than how many surgeries they had performed."

If you need to have surgery, Gentile said, it might be a good idea to ask if your doctor has played video games.

The study involved 33 surgeons from Beth Israel Medical Center. The doctors answered a questionnaire about video game play and surgical experience. They then went through a program that measures specific surgical skills, including inner-body suturing. They were then asked to play "Super Monkey Ball 2," "Star Wars Racer Revenge" and "Silent Scope."

Gentile said the experiment has its roots in a rumor one of the authors heard during medical school: that surgeons who played video games were better.

But he did offer one bit of warning: Playing too many video games does hurt a person's academic performance - and their chances of getting into medical school in the first place.

"I'm concerned about parents reading this or kids saying, 'See, video games are good,'" he said. "The amount of games that were played here was about three hours a week. The average boy plays 13 hours a week. The average kid spends 40 hours a week in front of a screen. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than two hours a day."

Olson, who got his first PlayStation while in medical school, said his favorite game is "Spira," which features "a lot of flying, jumping, swinging. It's a lot of multitasking."

One of his best surgery instructors in residency was an Atari champion as a child, he noted.

"It's all a two-dimensional world," he said.

Contact Ann McGlynn at (563) 383-2336 or amcglynn@qctimes.com.