[en] In current morphological pancreas diagnosis, main emphasis is placed on an early detection of pancreas carcinoma, i.e. on the diagnosis of tumors less than 1 cm in size, and on an exact differentiation between pancreas carcinoma and chronic pancreatitis. The somewhat pessimistic attitude shown so far towards the diagnostic methods available has been due to bad results in the diagnosis of apparent pancreas carcinoma, and to complications resulting from invasive diagnostic techniques. An improvement of diagnostic results by new methods and an inter-disciplinary cooperation is now in the offing. This applies both to pre-operative diagnosis and to diagnosis under operation. Especially two methods, thin-needle aspiration biopsy and cytology, in combination with radiological methods have brought about a promising large number of positive diagnoses with only extremely few complications. The successful use of morphological methods in the classification and staging of pancreas carcinoma as well as in the differential diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis is reported here. Future efforts will have to be directed towards further improvement of thin-needle biopsy diagnosis, particularly by combining this technique with the advantages of ERCP and the immunological determination of the CEA and other tumor antigens in the pancreatic juice. (orig.)