Surgical Cholecystectomy Score (SCS) for grading the difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy.

BACKGROUND

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is the standard of care for symptomatic gall stone disease. A good scoring system is necessary to standardize the reporting. Our aim was to develop and validate an objective scoring system, the Surgical Cholecystectomy Score (SCS) to grade the difficulty of LC.

METHODS

The study was conducted in a single surgical unit at a tertiary care hospital in two phases from January 2017 to April 2021. Retrospective data was analysed and the difficulty of each procedure was graded according to the modified Nassar's scoring system. Significant preoperative and intraoperative data obtained was given a weightage score. In phase II, these scores were validated on a prospective cohort. Each procedure was classified either as easy, moderately difficult or difficult.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

A univariate analysis was performed on the data followed by a multivariate regression analysis. Bidirectional stepwise selection was done to select the most significant variables. The Beta /Schneeweiss scoring system was used to generate a rounded risk score.

RESULTS

Data of 800 patients was retrieved and graded. 10 intraoperative parameters were found to be significant. Each variable was assigned a rounded risk score. The final SCS range for intraoperative parameters was 0-15. The scoring system was validated on a cohort of 249 LC. In the final scoring, cut off SCS of > 8 was found to correlate with difficult procedures. Score of < 2 was equivalent to easy LC. A score between 2 and 8 indicated moderate difficulty. The area under ROC curve was 0.98 and 0.92 for the intraoperative score indicating that the score was an excellent measure of the difficulty level of LCs.

CONCLUSION

The scoring system developed in this study has shown an excellent correlation with the difficulty of LC. It needs to be validated in different cohorts and across multiple centers further.