Fluoroless Ureteroscopy Under Local Anesthetic Gel: Experience from a Canadian Tertiary Referral Center
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Flexible ureteroscopy (URS) is the backbone of diagnosing upper urinary tract pathologies. Recent advancements in scope design have led to smaller, more maneuverable scopes with enhanced precision. The aim of this study was to assess feasibility of fluoroless URS under a local anesthetic (LA) gel. Patients and Methods: A prospective cohort study was performed at a Canadian tertiary care center. All patients booked for a diagnostic URS were included in this study. All patients were given intraurethral local lidocaine gel and instructed to signal if discomfort was encountered. Data collected include age, gender, indications of URS, history of URS, ureteral stenting, comorbidity index, and the use of a guidewire, as well as pain using a visual analog scale. Results: A total of 61 URSs using LA were performed on 38 patients. The majority of patients were men (68.9%). Indications for URS were to rule out upper tract urothelial cancer (47.5%), stricture (32.8%), or urolithiasis (19.7%). The average pain score, as rated by the visual analog scale, was 2.05 (standard deviation = 2.037). Only one patient did not want to continue his URS under LA. Guidewire use was associated with an average increase of 1.87 in pain score when compared with freehand URS (β = 1.869, standard error [SE] = 0.610, t = 3.063, p = 0.004, r partial = 0.398). Male patients reported a 1.38 decrease in pain scores compared with female patients (β = −1.380, SE = 0.615, t = −2.244, p = 0.029, r partial = −0.302). Conclusions: LA URS was well tolerated in our patient population. Randomized controlled trials on URS with LA vs general or spinal anesthesia are needed to broaden its use, increase accessibility, and improve health care resource utilization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".