Simultaneous determination of composition of human urinary calculi by use of artificial neural networks.

A new chemometric method, which uses artificial neural networks (ANN), is presented for determination of the composition of urinary calculi. The selected constituents were whewellite, weddellite, and uric acid from which approximately 40% of the urinary calculi obtained from Macedonia patients are composed. The results for the synthetic mixtures were better then those obtained by partial least squares (PLS) regression or by the principal component regression (PCR), because neural networks have better prediction capacity. The generalization abilities of the optimized neural networks were checked using the standard addition method on carefully selected real natural samples.