[Intrahepatic biliary cystic lesions]

Intrahepatic biliary cysts encompass a large lesional spectrum including hereditary diseases as polycystic liver disease or Caroli's syndrome, malformative lesions as non hereditary Caroli's disease or simple biliary cyst and true neoplastic lesions as cystadenoma or cystadenocarcinoma. The diagnostic approach of these lesions relies firstly on imaging. Nevertheless, the pathologist not exceptionally receives surgical specimens from cystic fenestration or liver specimen resection with one or several cystic lesions. The clues for pathological diagnosis of these lesions have to be known by pathologists. As regards neoplastic cystic lesions, true non-communicating cystic tumors and cystic variants of intraductal biliary tumors have to be distinguished; in both cases, the classification is now identical to the one of pancreatic cystic tumors.