Usefulness of surgical complexity classification index in cataract surgery process

To evaluate the usefulness of surgical complexity classification index (SCCI) to predict the degree of surgical difficulty in cataract surgery.

This retrospective study includes data collected between January 2013 and December 2014 from patients who underwent cataract extraction by phacoemulsification at our hospital. A sample size of 159 patients was obtained by simple random sampling (P=.5, 10% accuracy, 95% confidence). The main variables were: recording and value of SCCI in electronic medical record (EMR), presence of exfoliation syndrome (XFS), criteria for inclusion in surgical waiting list (SWL), and functional results. SCCI was classified into 7 categories (range: 1-4) according to predictors of technical difficulty, which was indirectly estimated in terms of surgical time (ST). All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS v15.0 statistical software.

Prevalence of XFS was 18.2% (95%CI: 11.9-24.5). In terms of quality indicators in the cataract surgery process, 96.8% of patients met at least one of the criteria to be included in SWL, and 98.1% gained ≥2 Snellen lines. The SCCI was recorded in EMR of 98.1% patients, and it was grouped for study into 2 categories: High and low surgical complexity. Statistically significant differences in the distribution of ST were found depending on the assigned SCCI (P<.005) and the presence of XFS (P<.005).

The SCCI enables to estimate the degree of surgical complexity in terms of ST in cataract surgery, which is especially useful in those areas with high prevalence of XFS, because of the higher theoretical risk of surgical complications.