← Issue №15/ week of Oct 11, 2026/Hepatology

Superior diagnostic yield of mini-laparoscopy over transjugular liver biopsy in acute-on-chronic liver failure: a case-control study.

From GI Signals issue №15: what this paper found, what it changes, and where it sits against the current standard of care, reviewed by Simon Mathews, MD.

Hepatology retrospective · n=73 · Oct 5, 2026 · BMC Gastro · IF 2.5

Superior diagnostic yield of mini-laparoscopy over transjugular liver biopsy in acute-on-chronic liver failure: a case-control study.

New evidencecirrhosisacute liver failure
Clinical takeawayWhere mini-laparoscopy is available at an expert center, it is an option when a transjugular sample is likely to be inadequate: in this single-center retrospective series (57 vs 16 ACLF patients) transjugular specimens were technically inadequate in 31%, while mini-laparoscopy caused minor complications in 81% of ACLF patients and major complications were rare with both. Transjugular biopsy remains the standard route when coagulopathy or ascites preclude percutaneous biopsy.
What it foundMini-laparoscopy (MB) achieved 100% technical evaluability vs. 31.3% failure in transjugular biopsy (TB) in ACLF patients, with 3.6% diagnostic failure in MB vs. 6.2% in TB, despite higher minor complication rates (80.7% in ACLF-MB vs. 52.6% in LC-MB).
ContextRefines current practice by demonstrating superior diagnostic yield of MB over TB in ACLF patients, a high-risk population where accurate diagnosis is critical.
No standard claimed for this paper

Every paper is compared to the standard governing its question. This one is not: either no standard in the corpus matches it, or the comparison did not hold up on review and was withdrawn rather than published unverified. Both are logged.

Weisner L … Huebener P · BMC Gastroenterology · IF 2.5 · PubMed ↗Permalink
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