Validation and comparison of two laparoscopic liver resection difficulty scores.

Background: Numerous randomised control trials (RCT) have demonstrated the superiority of laparoscopic liver resections ( LLR) with regards to post operative pain, blood loss and hospital stay with mortality of 0.39% as per a sytematic review by Mirnezami et al . Over the last 3 decades the techniques for LLR have seen refinement and standardisation. The Iwate criteria (IC) grades the difficulty of laparosopic resection into four grades low, intermediate, advanced and expert based on six variables .