The database of studies of 82 patients with acute pancreatitis are presented. Using neural network analysis, the most indicative parameters for predicting acute pancreatitis were revealed: indexes of Kalf-Kalif intoxication modified by Kostyuchenko and Khomich, Reis, Garkavi, the ratio of leukocytes to ESR, leukocyte index, general intoxication index; sonographic parameters – the size of the head of the pancreas, the diameter of the splenic vein, the presence of free fluid in the abdominal cavity; biochemical parameters – blood amylase concentration, urine diastase. When conducting clustering in a multidimensional feature space, a Kohonen neural network was created. All analyzed objects were effectively divided into 3 clusters. The most severe and prognostically unfavorable is cluster 1, which included data from 30 patients, with the maximum mortality rate and maximum hospital stay.

The article presents the review of the literature data covering the most common causes of obstructive jaundice, methods for its differential diagnosis, as well as sonographic criteria for making a diagnosis. Based on the review, it was found that in practical surgery, ultrasound has a number of advantages in the differential diagnosis of obstructive jaundice. Sonography is an affordable, non-invasive method with high information content, allowing to make a diagnosis in the shortest possible time. The main reliable sonographic criteria for the obstructive genesis of icterus is prestenotic dilatation of the bile ducts. However, since the interpretation of ultrasound results is subjective and depends on the qualifications of the ultrasound specialist, verification of sonographic information by other research methods is necessary.