Recongnition of the diagnosis and treatments of local complications in acute pancreatitis        YANG Yin-mo. Department of Surgery, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing 100034, China
Abstract    Local complications often occur in acute pancreatitis (AP) and have been defined by the Atlanta Symposium on Acute Pancreatitis in 1992. Two decades since the Atlanta Conference additional experience has brought to light the inadequacy and poor understanding of the terms used by different specialists involved in the care of patients with AP when interpreting imaging modalities and the need for a uniformly used classification system. Recognizing the deficiency, some revisions of the Atlanta classification have been proposed by some research groups. The 4 major subsets of local complications in AP as modified by the research groups' revision are “acute peripancreatic fluid collections”,  “pancreatic pseudocyst”,  “postnecrotic pancreatic/peripancreatic fluid collections” and “walled-off pancreatic necrosis”. Differentiation of one from another is important because management varies with the type of local complications.