Abstract: Objective To investigate the clinical application value, efficiency and safety of precut sphincterotomy in endoscopic retrograde cholangio-pancreatography (ERCP) .Methods From January 2008 to June 2011, 930 patients received ERCP in the department of hepatobiliary surgery of the first hospital of Jilin University.Of them 108 cases (11.6%) were diverted to receive precut sphincterotomy, because selective bile duct cannulation with conventional method was difficult.Inclusion criteria: failure of conventional cannulation or repeating pancreatic duct cannulation for more than 4 times.According to the patient's conditions, the examination and treatment of ERCP was carried out.Observation termination are therapeutic success rate and the incidence rate of complications, and comparative analysis on case data of routine ERCP was made.Statistical analysis was executed by SPSS 13.0 software.Comparison of ratio were determined with χ2 test, a value less than 0.05 was considered as significant.Results Of 108 cases, the success rate of ERCP was 95.4% (103 cases) .The incidence rate of complications was 6.5%, and there are no cases of duodenal perforation and death.Amongst 822 cases of routine ERCP, therapeutic success rate was 97.7%, and the incidence rate of complications was 7.7%.The statistics analysis result indicates that there are no statistical differences between precut sphincterotomy group and routine ERCP groups in the success rate (χ2=2.041, P=0.153) and the incidence rate of complications (χ2=0.141, P=0.707) .Conclusion The precut sphincterotomy in ERCP are safe and obviously effective with less complications compared to routine ERCP.The successful probability of difficult ERCP is improved greatly by using the technique of precut sphincterotomy.But the precut sphincterotomy indication is strictly controlled, and the technique should be performed by experienced endoscopist.