The interventional radiologist plays a large clinical role in the treatment of kidney stones that are unlikely to pass on their own. The gold standard of treatment for these types of stones is surgical removal. However, some patients have an infected stone and are simply too ill for an operative surgical removal. In these instances, the mainstay of IR treatment is a percutaneous nephrostomy tube. This is a procedure where a small caliber catheter is placed through the skin and into the urinary collecting system upstream of the stone. This procedure not only drains any infection, often bringing about a precipitous improvement in the patient's symptoms but also diverts urine—thus giving the patient more time to recover before definitive surgical treatment.