Emerging trends and hot spots on electrical impedance tomography extrapulmonary applications

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) develops rapidly in technology and applications. Nowadays EIT is used in multiple clinical and experimental scenarios including pulmonary, brain, and tissue monitoring, etc. The present study explores the research trends and hotspots on EIT extrapulmonary application research by bibliometrics analysis.

Publications on EIT extrapulmonary applications between 1987 and 2021 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. For precise screening, search strategy "electrical impedance tomography" plus "hemodynamic" or "brain" or "nerve" or "cancer" or "venous" or "vessel" or "tumor" or "veterinary" or "tissue" or "cell" or "wearable" or "application" and excluding "lung", "ventilation" "respiratory", "pulmonary", "algorithm", "current", "voltage" or "electrode" were used. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to analyze the publication features, collaboration, keywords co-occurrence, and co-cited reference.

A total of 506 articles were finally identified. The global publication numbers on extrapulmonary applications gradually increased yearly in the past 30 years. The US, UK, and China contributed most three publications concerning EIT extrapulmonary applications. "tissues", "conductivity", "model" were research hotspots, and "cutaneous melanoma", "microstructure", "diagnosis" were recent topics (Portions of this research have previously been presented in poster form).

Overall, EIT extrapulmonary applications bibliometrics analysis provides a unique insight into research focus, current trends, and future directions.