AbstractA theoretical investigation of both deterministic and statistical approaches to modulational instability arising in the cylindrical nonlinear von Neumann equation (CNLvNE) is carried out. This is done on the basis of a recently discovered exact mapping that relates the CNLvNE to the standard one. We show that the dispersion relations of the cylindrical case (for the examples considered here) do not depend explicitly on time and their functional forms do not change with respect to the corresponding standard cases. These results differ from the previous investigations.