When considering surgical intervention for the treatment of chronic pancreatitis, it should be remembered that apart from primary chronic pancreatitis there may be pancreatitis secondary to adjacent adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. To establish a morphological diagnosis an open biopsy may be performed intraoperatively or a fine needle biopsy may be performed either pre- or intraoperatively. Open biopsy provides larger tissue samples thereby facilitating histomorphological evaluation. However, only few peripheral biopsies are possible with this technique. Conversely, samples obtained by fine needle biopsy are smaller, sometimes yielding only clusters of cells, which are more difficult to interpret. Yet, with the possibility of repeated sampling from the core of the pancreas the diagnostic sensitivity is higher for fine needle biopsy (70-90%) than for open biopsy.

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