Emerging trends and research foci of deep learning in spine: bibliometric and visualization study

As the cognition of spine develops, deep learning (DL) emerges as a powerful tool with tremendous potential for advancing research in this field. To provide a comprehensive overview of DL-spine research, our study utilized bibliometric and visual methods to retrieve relevant articles from the Web of Science database. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were primarily used for literature measurement and knowledge graph analysis. A total of 273 studies focusing on deep learning in the spine, with a combined total of 2302 citations, were retrieved. Additionally, the overall number of articles published on this topic demonstrated a continuous upward trend. China was the country with the highest number of publications, whereas the USA had the most citations. The two most prominent journals were "European Spine Journal" and "Medical Image Analysis," and the most involved research area was Radiology Nuclear Medicine Medical Imaging. VOSviewer identified three visually distinct clusters: "segmentation," "area," and "neural network." Meanwhile, CiteSpace highlighted "magnetic resonance image" and "lumbar" as the keywords with the longest usage, and "agreement" and "automated detection" as the most commonly used keywords. Although the application of DL in spine is still in its infancy, its future is promising. Intercontinental cooperation, extensive application, and more interpretable algorithms will invigorate DL in the field of spine.