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Background

There are roughly 300,000 hospitalizations for acute pancreatitis annually in the United States. Many of the affected patients at our institution undergo computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unnecessarily early during their admissions. We hypothesize that cross-sectional imaging within 48 h of admission in patients meeting the criteria for acute, mild pancreatitis is over-utilized and does not change management.

Methods

We performed a retrospective analysis of patients with a discharge diagnosis of acute pancreatitis from our tertiary care institution from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2015. Inclusion criteria were a lipase more than three times the upper limit of normal and clinical suspicion of pancreatitis. Exclusion criteria were an etiology of pancreatitis following endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, recurrent or chronic pancreatitis, severe pancreatitis, and …