The Safety and Efficacy of Single-Operator Cholangioscopy in the Treatment of Difficult Common Bile Duct Stones after Failed Conventional ERCP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Common bile duct (CBD) stones are extracted with a basket or balloon during ERCP with sphincterotomy. However, some stones are difficult to extract by conventional means. Cholangioscopy with lithotripsy is a modality to treat these difficult stones. We describe the clinical efficacy of single-operator per oral cholangioscopy (SOPOC) for difficult stones and discuss cost savings by avoiding surgical intervention. METHODS: Retrospective chart review was performed for all patients referred for difficult CBD stones. Clinical success was defined as clearing the duct of all stones. The cost of cholangioscopy (in $CDN) was calculated by adding all costs associated with the procedure(s), surgery, hospital stay or treatment of adverse events. This cost was compared with the projected cost of surgical bile duct exploration. RESULTS: A total of 51 patients (35 female) with a mean age of 66 years underwent 58 SOPOC procedures. Median procedure time was 67 minutes (95% CI, 61.5-73.5). The CBD was successfully cleared in 47 of 51 patients (93%). Minor adverse events were seen in seven patients (14%). The actual average per procedure cost was $4555±$2647. This compares with a projected cost of $7766 and $6175 for open and laparoscopic bile duct exploration, with a cost-per-case saving of $3210 and $1619, respectively. CONCLUSION: SOPOC with lithotripsy is highly effective and safe for the treatment of difficult common bile duct stones. In addition, significant cost savings may be realized by avoiding surgical bile duct exploration.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".