Clinical application value of difficulty score systems before laparoscopic liver resection / 临床肝胆病杂志

ABSTRACT

ObjectiveTo investigate the accuracy of three laparoscopic liver resection (LLR) difficulty score systems (DSSs) in evaluating surgical difficulty and predicting short-term postoperative outcome. MethodsThe retrospective cohort study was conducted for 142 patients who underwent LLR in The First Hospital of Lanzhou University from June 2015 to May 2020, and their preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative clinical data were collected. According to preoperative clinical data, DSS-B score, Hasegawa score, and Halls score were used to determine the difficulty score of surgery for each patient, and then the patients were divided into low, medium, and high difficulty groups. Intraoperative data were compared between the three groups to verify the accuracy of the three DSSs, and postoperative clinical data were used to evaluate the ability of DSSs to predict short-term postoperative outcome. An analysis of variance was used for comparison of normally distributed continuous data between multiple groups, and the least significant difference t-test was used for further comparison between two groups; the Kruskal-Wallis H test was used for comparison of non-normally distributed continuous data between multiple or two groups. The chi-square test or the Fisher’s exact test was used for comparison of categorical data between groups, and the Bonferroni method was used for correction of P values between two groups. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was calculated to evaluate the efficiency of each DSS in predicting postoperative complications. ResultsAmong the 142 patients, there were 37 patients in the low difficulty group, 56 in the medium difficulty group, and 49 in the high difficulty group based on DSS-B score; there were 70 patients in the low difficulty group, 47 in the medium difficulty group, and 25 in the high difficulty group based on Hasegawa score; there were 46 patients in the low difficulty group, 62 in the medium difficulty group, and 34 in the high difficulty group based on Halls score. For the low, medium, and high difficulty groups based on DSS-B score, Hasegawa score, or Halls score, time of operation, intraoperative blood loss, and rate of hepatic portal occlusion increased with the increase in difficulty score (all P＜0.001); there was a significant difference in intraoperative blood transfusion rate between the medium and high difficulty groups based on DSS-B score (P＜0.017), between the low and high difficulty groups based on Halls score (P＜0.017), and between the low, medium, and high difficulty groups based on Hasegawa score (P＜0.017). There was a significant difference in the rate of conversion to laparotomy between the medium and high difficulty groups based on DSS-B score (P＜0.017), and Hasegawa score and Halls score identified the difference between the low and high difficulty groups (P＜0.017). For the length of postoperative hospital stay, DSS-B score and Halls score only identified the difference between the low and high difficulty groups (P＜0.05), while Hasegawa score identified the difference between the low difficulty group and the medium/high difficulty groups (P＜0.05); for the incidence rate of postoperative complications, only Hasegawa score effectively identified the difference between the high difficulty group and the low/medium difficulty groups (P＜0.017). DSS-B score, Halls score, and Hasegawa score had an AUC of 0.636 (95% confidence interval ［CI］ 0.515-0.758), 0.557 (95% CI 0.442-0.673), and 0.760 (95% CI 0.654-0.866), respectively, in predicting postoperative complications, among which Hasegawa score had the highest predictive efficiency. ConclusionDSS-B score and Hasegawa score can better assess the difficulty of LLR, and Hasegawa score has an advantage in predicting short-term postoperative outcome.