Preoperative Prediction of Difficult Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy: A Scoring Method

Abstract

Abstract Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is the most frequent operation nowadays for gallbladder stones. It is associated with faster recovery and shorter hospital stay. On the wide use of laparoscopic cholecystectomy, various com-plications appeared. This made researches work on studies to predict the difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy through different scoring system. This study validates the usage of a scoring system for preoperative prediction of intraoperative difficulties of lapar-oscopic cholecystectomy that may help the patient as well as surgeon in being better prepared for intraoperative challenges. Gallbladder-related disease is one of the common surgical elective and emergency indications. Laparoscopic cholecys-tectomy (LC) is the gold standard nowadays for gallbladder removal. The frequency of complications associated with laparo-scopic cholecystectomy varies from 0.5-6%. Complications of cholecystectomy include iatrogenic perforation of gallblad-der with spilt gallstones that is considered the most common, bile duct injury, bile leaks, bleeding and bowel injury. Con-version rate was about 5% of all laparoscopic cholecystecto-mies. Many risk factors have been found to be associated with difficult laparoscopic cholecytectomy. These result in part from patient selection, surgical inexperience, and the technical constraints that are inherent to the minimally invasive approach. Scoring proposed by Randhawa and Pujahari in 2008 is the most used currently. They found its statistically and clinically good test for predicting outcome in LC. This score had positive predictive value of 88.8% and 92.2% for easy and difficult. One of the unique features in this score is the inclusion of palpable Gallbladder that was not reported earlier. But there was no correlation of score and conversion in this study as all cases of conversion were due to anomalous ducts that could have been predicted by MRCP. It included various clinical and ultrasonographic parameters. Aim of Study: To validate a risk score based on the patient's history, physical examination and abdominal ultrasonography parameters for preoperative prediction of difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Patients and Methods: Our study included 30 patients underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Ain Shams Hos-pital and Alamria Hospital. Results: In our study, males were more predominant than females (73.3% vs 26.7%) with mean age of (40.23±13.64) years. Our patients had mean BMI of (28.43±4.03) kg/m2 with most of them were obese (63.3%). Intra operative diffi-culty showed significant relation with sex and BMI. 13.3% of patients had leukocytosis and all our patients had normal alkaline phosphatase. 56.7% of the study patients were presented with previous acute attacks, 20% presented with fever, 6.7% had palpable GB and 33.3% had abdominal scar. Intra operative difficulty showed significant relation with previous acute attack, abdominal scar and GB wall thickness. We found that preoperative scoring had a sensitivity of 89.5%, specificity of 100%, positive predictive value of 100%, negative predictive value of 84.6%, diagnostic accuracy of 93.3%, and Kappa agreement of 0.862 compared to the intraoperative scoring system. Conclusion: We strongly recommend using the preoper-ative scoring system for predicting the degree of difficulty for laparoscopic cholecystectomy.