Inter-surgeon Variability in Cystic Artery Lymph Node Excision during Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy
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Murphy, Skyle
Baade, Ingrid
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Introduction: Expert opinion recommends that surgeons perform a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) in a standardized manner by dissecting the hepatobiliary triangle lateral to the cystic artery lymph node (LN) to minimize the rate of a major bile duct injury.
Methods: To determine whether surgeons performed a laparoscopic cholecystectomy in a standardized manner, the study assessed the variability in the frequency of an LN excision. All LCs that were performed at a single hospital were identified from a prospective dataset. The presence of an LN was retrospectively determined from the histology report.
Results: Twenty-seven surgeons were recorded to have performed 2332 laparoscopic cholecystectomies. Out of the total number of patients, 76.8% were female. The median patient age was 42.4 years. About 60.8% of the LCs were elective, while 39.2% of them were acute. Nineteen pathologists reported that in 99% of the specimens – the LN status of 1831 (78.5%) gallbladders was reported and analyzed. Overall, the LN yield per surgeon varied from 0% to 50% (mean 18.7%).
Conclusion: The high inter-surgeon variability in the rate of LN excision during laparoscopic cholecystectomy shows that surgeons dissect the hepatobiliary triangle differently. The LN yield may also represent a surrogate marker of surgical technique (which is easy to measure).
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Cureus
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10
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6
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© 2018 Wysocki et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY 3.0., which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Biomedical and clinical sciences