An Overview for Clinicians on Intraductal Papillary Mucinous Neoplasms (IPMNs) of the Pancreas

Currently, there is no reliable method of discerning between low-risk and high-risk intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMNs). Operative resection is utilized in an effort to resect those lesions with high-grade dysplasia (HGD) prior to the development of invasive disease. The current guidelines recommend resection for IPMN that involve the main pancreatic duct. Resecting lesions with HGD before their progression to invasive disease and the avoidance of resection in those patients with low-grade dysplasia is the optimal clinical scenario. Therefore, the importance of developing preoperative models able to discern HGD in IPMN patients cannot be overstated. Low-risk patients should be managed with nonsurgical treatment options (typically MRI surveillance), while high-risk patients would undergo resection, hopefully prior to the formation of invasive disease. Current research is evolving in multiple directions. First, there is an ongoing effort to identify reliable markers for predicting malignant transformation of IPMN, mainly focusing on genomic and transcriptomic data from blood, tissue, and cystic fluid. Also, multimodal models of combining biomarkers with clinical and radiographic data seem promising for providing robust and accurate answers of risk levels for IPMN patients.