Ice-breaking sign: A radiological sign influencing the treatment strategies for choledocholithiasis
Xiao-Yu Zhao, Ming Chen, Gang Wang, Long Cui, Zhi Xu, Chun-Sheng Hou, Li-Xin Wang, Ling-Fu Zhang, Xiao-Feng Ling
Xiao-Yu Zhao, Gang Wang, Long Cui, Zhi Xu, Chun-Sheng Hou, Li-Xin Wang, Ling-Fu Zhang, Xiao-Feng Ling, Department of General Surgery, Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing 100191, China
Ming Chen, Department of Radiology, Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing 100191, China
Co-first authors: Xiao-Yu Zhao and Ming Chen.
Co-corresponding authors: Ling-Fu Zhang and Xiao-Feng Ling.
Author contributions: Zhao XY performed data collection and statistical analysis; Zhao XY and Chen M drafted the manuscript, they contributed equally to this article, they are the co-first authors of this manuscript; Zhao XY and Chen M, Zhang LF, and Ling XF designed the research study; Wang G, Cui L, Xu Z, Hou CS and Wang LX contributed to the review and revision of the manuscript; Zhang LF and Ling XF contributed equally to this article, they are the co-corresponding authors of this manuscript; and all authors thoroughly reviewed and endorsed the final manuscript.
Supported by Clinical Cohort Construction Program of Peking University Third Hospital, No. BYSYDL2023005; and Peking University Third Hospital Innovation Transformation Fund, No. BYSYZHZB2023105.
Institutional review board statement: This study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Peking University Third Hospital, approval No. IRB00006761-M2022592.
Informed consent statement: Informed consent for data sharing was not obtained from the participants but the presented data are anonymized and risk of identification is low.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at
xiaofengling@bjmu.edu.cn. Informed consent for data sharing was not obtained from the participants but the presented data are anonymized and risk of identification is low.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See:
https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Corresponding author: Xiao-Feng Ling, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of General Surgery, Peking University Third Hospital, No. 49 Huayuan North Road, Beijing 100191, China.
xiaofengling@bjmu.edu.cn
Received: March 6, 2025
Revised: April 17, 2025
Accepted: May 20, 2025
Published online: July 27, 2025
Processing time: 140 Days and 19.2 Hours
