Biliary cannulation in endoscopic retrograde cholangiography: How to tackle the difficult papilla.

BACKGROUND In the setting of a naive papilla, biliary cannulation is a key step in successfully performing endoscopic retrograde cholangiography (ERC). Difficult biliary cannulation (DBC) is associated with an increased risk of post-ERCP-pancreatitis and failure of the whole procedure. SUMMARY Recommendations for biliary cannulation can be divided in (a) measures to reduce the likelihood of a difficult papilla-situation a priori and (b) rescue techniques in case the endoscopist is actually facing DBC. (a): careful inspection of the papillary anatomy and optimizing its accessibility by scope-positioning is fundamental. A sphincterotome in combination with a soft-tip hydrophilic guide-wire rather than a standard catheter with a standard guide-wire should be used. (b): The most important rescue techniques are needle-knife precut, double-guidewire technique and transpancreatic sphincterotomy. In few cases, anterograde techniques are needed. To this regard, the EUS-guided biliary drainage (EUS-BD) followed by rendezvous is increasingly used as an alternative to percutaneous-transhepatic biliary drainage. Key Messages: Biliary cannulation can be accomplished with alternative retrograde or less frequently by salvage-anterograde techniques, once conventional direct cannulation attempts have failed. Considering recent favorable data for the early use of transpancreatic sphincterotomy, an adopted version of the 2016 European-Society-for-Gastrointestinal-Endoscopy (ESGE)-algorithm on biliary cannulation is proposed.