Knowledge map of artificial intelligence in neurodegenerative diseases: a decade-long bibliometric and visualization study

Junwei Huang¹Shuqi Wang²Xuankai Liao³Danting Su³Rubing Lin⁴Tao Zhang^5*Long Zhao⁵

• ¹Sydney Smart Technology College, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao, Qinghuangdao, HeBei, China
• ²Department of Clinical Laboratory, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, Sichuan, China
• ³Department of Pathology, The Seventh Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China
• ⁴Department of Orthopedics, Shenzhen Children’s Hospital, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
• ⁵Department of Neurosurgery, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical Colledge, Nanchong, Sichuan, China

Background: As the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases increases, the related AI research is getting more and more advanced. In this study, we analyze the literature in this field over the last decade through bibliometric and visualization methods with the aim of mining the prominent journals, institutions, authors, and countries in this field and analyzing the keywords in order to speculate on possible future research trends.Methods: Our study extracted 1,921 relevant publications spanning 2015-2025 from the Web of Science Core Collection database. We conducted comprehensive bibliometric analyses and knowledge mapping visualizations using established scientometric tools: CiteSpace and Bibliometrix.Results: A total of 1921 documents were included in the study, the number of publications in this field showed an overall increasing trend, and the average number of citations showed a downward trend since 2019. Among the journals, Scientific Reports had the highest number of publications. In addition, we identified 22 core journals. Institution wise, University of London has the highest participation. Among the authors, the highest number of publications is Benzinger, Tammie. The highest number of citations is Fingere Elizabeth. At the national level, the United States is number one in the world in terms of influence in this field, and China is ranked number two, both of which are well ahead of other countries and are major contributors to this field. The analysis of keywords showed the centrality of alzheimer disease, machine learning, parkinsons disease, and deep learning. All the studies were clustered based on keywords to get seven clusters: 0. immune infiltration; 1. parkinsons disease; 2. multiple sclerosis; 3. mild cognitive impairment; 4. deep learning; 5. machine learning; 6. freesurfer; 7. scale. In addition, we also found the continuation of the trending topics, which are parkinsons disease, deep learning, and machine learning.Conclusion: Based on the relationship between keywords and time, we speculate that there are four possible research trends: 1. Precision diagnosis with multimodal data fusion. 2. Pathological mechanism analysis and target discovery. 3. Interpretable AI and clinical translation. 4. Technology differentiation for subdivided diseases.