Evaluation of preoperative predictive factors for difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy in comparison with intraoperative parameters

Objective The aim was to assess the preoperative predictive factors that determine difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) in comparison with intraoperative parameters and outcome. Patients and methods This prospective study include 100 patients having symptomatic cholelithiasis. All patients underwent elective LC in Department of General Surgery in Aswan University Hospital. The collected data include the parameters of preoperative scoring system, which were male sex, old age, history of hospitalization, obesity (BMI), abdominal scar, palpable gallbladder (GB), wall thickness of GB, pericholecystic collection, and impacted stone. The difficulty levels according to preoperative score were easy (0-5), difficult (6-10), and very difficult (11-15). Various intraoperative parameters were faced while doing LC that were considered for intraoperative scoring system, which categorizes the patients into easy, difficult, and very difficult surgical procedure on the basis of time taken in minutes, bile/stone spillage, injury to duct, and conversion to open cholecystectomy. Results In this study, previous history of hospitalization (P=0.001 and 0.01) and wall thickness (P=0.007 and 0.02) were found to be statistically significant in predicting difficult LC in both univariate and multivariate analyses. Other factors such as age (P=0.002), BMI greater than 27.5 (P=0.02), palpable GB (P=0.003), and impacted stone (P=0.01) were found to be statistically significant in univariate analysis in predicting difficult LC. Remaining factors such as sex, abdominal scar, and pericholecystic collection were not found to be statistically significant in predicting difficult LC. Receiver operating characteristic curve for prediction of intraoperative outcome based on preoperative score for difficult/very difficult versus easy cases at cutoff point greater than 5 and area under the curve of 0.86, with 95% confidence interval=0.77-0.92, showed sensitivity of 74.3, specificity of 96.9, positive predictive value of 92.9, negative predictive value of 87.5, and accuracy of 85.6. Conclusion We concluded that the preoperative scoring system is statistically and clinically a good test for predicting the operative outcome in LC.