Kidney stone analysis: “Give me your stone, I will tell you who you are!”

INTRODUCTION: Stone analysis is an important part in the evaluation of patients having stone disease. This could orientate the physician toward particular etiologies. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Chemical and physical methods are both used for analysis. Unfortunately, chemical methods often are inadequate to analyze accurately urinary calculi and could fail to detect some elements into the stone. Physical methods, in counterpart, are becoming more and more used in high-volume laboratories. The present manuscript will provide a review on analytic methods, and review all the information that should be included into an appropriate morpho-constitutional analysis. CONCLUSION: This report can supply an excellent summarization of the stone morphology and give the opportunity to find specific metabolic disorders and different lithogenic process into the same stone. Here, specific chemical types with their different crystalline phases are shown in connection with their different etiologies involved.