Introduction. Acute pancreatitis is one of the most common clinical problems in the daily practice of a surgeon that often becomes quite difficult to solve even for experienced clinicians having long experience. The available data on the comparison of the existing criteria for acute pancreatitis are rather contradictory, therefore, the choice of the optimal method to assess a patient with acute pancreatitis is still relevant and requires further study. Aim: to compare the capabilities of existing systems of acute pancreatitis assessment in predicting the course of acute pancreatitis. Materials and methods. Receiver operating characteristic (ROCcurve) was used to assess the predictive value of each set of criteria; the area under the curve (AUC) of the five scoring systems was calculated individually for both groups of patients. Results. The study compared the predictive opportunities of Marshall, BISAP, HAPS, Panc 3, and JPN criteria. From 36 patients, severe acute pancreatitis developed in 9 (25%) patients, of whom 3 (8.4%) died because of complications. AUC for Marshall, BISAP, HAPS, Panc 3 and JPN criteria was 0.829 (0.667-0.934) 0.899 (0.752-0.974), 0.885 (0.734-0.967), 0.870 (0.716-0.959), 0.969 (0.850-0.999), respectively. Pairwise comparison of the ROC-curves of the criteria revealed that a statistically significant difference in the AUC was determined only between the JPN system and Panc 3 (P <0.05), while the JPN criteria turned out to be the most informative in predicting the severe course of acute pancreatitis. Conclusion. Thus, all the criteria systems that took part in the comparison showed a moderate level of prognostic capabilities and did not have statistically significant differences in the general. However, it is worth noting that the Japanese criteria showed the highest performance with minimal time losses. Given the small number of patients in the severe acute pancreatitis group at a single-centre study, the results may differ from those that can be obtained from a larger cohort of patients. Further research in this direction is required to confirm the results obtained.