A Meta-Analysis of Evolution of Deep Learning Research in Medical Image Analysis

Abstract

With a text mining and bibliometrics approach, we review the literature on the evolution of deep learning in medical image literature from 2012 – 2020 to understand the current state of the research and to identify the major research themes in image analysis to answer our research questions: RQ1: What are the learning modes that are evident in the literature? RQ2: What are the emerging learning modes in the literature? RQ3: What are the major themes in medical imaging literature? The analysis of 8704 resulting from a data collection process from peer-reviewed databases, our analysis discovered the six major themes of image segmentation studies, studies with image classification, evaluation procedures such as sensitivity and specificity, optical coherence tomography studies, MRI imaging studies, and Chest imaging studies. Additionally, we assessed the number of articles published each year, the frequent keywords, the author networks, the trending topics, and connections to other topics. We discovered that segmenting and classifying the images are the most common tasks. Transfer learning is the most researched area and cancer is the highly targeted disease and Covid-19 is the most recent research trend.

Keywords

• medical image analysis
• text mining
• deep learning
• vosviewer