Anticipation of difficulty during laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC), is one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures worldwide, it is accepted as the gold standard in the treatment of symptomatic gallstones for its minimal invasiveness, less pain and early recovery. Purpose: To predict the difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in patients according to the recently published scoring system and select the difficult cases to be done by a senior surgeon. Patients: This is a prospective cohort study. This study took place Oct 6th University Hospital and Kasr El Aini Hospital, Cairo university; the study involved 120 patients admitted with calcular cholecystitis, arranged for laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Methods: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy after applying the scoring system. Results: In our study we found that age, sex and ultrasonographic data were significant predictive factors for assessment preoperatively difficult cases that will be operated upon. We found 14 patients above 50 years who scored to be difficult and very difficult were at outcome difficult, only three patients converted to open surgery over fifty. Conclusion: We can report that obese patient who were over fifty with history of previous upper abdominal surgery and ultrasonographic picture showed thick walled GB and pericholecystic collection had high risk of conversion. At this study scoring system was used for prediction of difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy sensitivity was 93.75% and specificity was 52.94% of the scoring system at score 5 for prediction of easy or difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy.