Multicenter Study of Laparoscopic Common Bile Duct Exploration for Choledocholithiasis in the English-Speaking Caribbean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Common bile duct (CBD) exploration to address choledocholithiasis is not widely practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean. This study sought to determine the frequency of laparoscopic CBD explorations in the English-speaking Caribbean and to document the stone clearance rates and short-term outcomes of this procedure. Methods We accessed records for all practicing laparoscopic surgeons in the English-speaking Caribbean who performed laparoscopic CBD explorations over a 10-year period from January 1, 2013, to June 30, 2023. The following data were extracted retrospectively from patient records: demographic details, operating time, stone clearance rates, retained stone rates, conversions, and complications. All data were analyzed with SPSS version 20 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY). Results Over the 10-year study period, 35 patients underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy and synchronous CBD exploration in Barbados, Cayman Islands, Guyana, Grenada, St Lucia, and Trinidad & Tobago. The procedure was performed at low volumes of only 0.7 procedures per surgical team per annum. The conversion rate to open CBD exploration was 13% and when laparoscopic CBD exploration was completed, it resulted in 96.3% stone clearance, 3.7% retained stones, mean hospitalization of two days, 9.7% minor morbidity, and no mortality. Conclusion Laparoscopic CBD exploration is feasible in the resource-poor Caribbean setting, and it yields good results, with 96.3% stone clearance rates, 9.7% minor morbidity, and no mortality. These results are better than those reported in Caribbean literature for stone extraction with endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreaticography (ERCP).
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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 | 0.000 | 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".