Technological Advancements in Cranial and Spinal Navigation in the Past 30 Years: A Detailed Patent Bibliometric...

The advent of cranial and spinal navigation technologies in the late 1990s fundamentally changed the practice of modern neurosurgery. Bibliometric analyses have historically been used to understand the influence of scholarly works upon subsequent scientific publications. More recently, studies have employed patent bibliometrics as a means of evaluating the most impactful intellectual property developments in a certain field as well as to quantify the impact of scientific publications upon patents. To our knowledge, no previous study has systematically explored technological developments in cranial and spinal navigation through a patent bibliometrics framework.

We performed a patent bibliometric analysis focused on cranial and spinal navigation using Lens, a publicly available database which includes more than 127 million global patent records from governmental entities around the globe (including the United States Patent and Trademark Office/USPTO, the IP Australia, the World Intellectual Property Organization/WIPO and the European Patent Office). The top 100 patents with the highest forward-citation count (i.e. number of citations of a patent by subsequent patents) were examined to evaluate their impact upon future innovations. We also analyzed the scholarly works most cited by patents as a means of understanding the scientific publications which most influenced technological developments in the field of navigation.

In total, 714 patents related to cranial and navigation technology were identified. Of these, 686 were cited by subsequent patents. The top-100 most-cited patents were further analyzed by category (including planning, registration, systems, processors, intraoperative processing, and devices), ownership, current status (active or expired) and geographic origin. Additionally, we identified nearly 15,000 scholarly works on the field of cranial and spinal navigation. Of these, 1107 (7.5%) were cited by patents. These works were analyzed by country and institution of origin and the top 10 publications most cited by patents were highlighted.

There has been an exponential growth in the number of patents in cranial and spinal navigation from 1990s to the present, ultimately revealing no evidence of a plateau of technological innovation in this field. Our data also demonstrates how newer technologies such as deep learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence are being progressively incorporated into patent applications in the field of cranial and spinal navigation.