Deep Learning on Histopathology Images for Breast Cancer Classification: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Medical imaging is gaining significant attention in healthcare, including breast cancer. Breast cancer is the most common cancer-related death among women worldwide. Currently, histopathology image analysis is the clinical gold standard in cancer diagnosis. However, the manual process of microscopic examination involves laborious work and can be misleading due to human error. Therefore, this study explored the research status and development trends of deep learning on breast cancer image classification using bibliometric analysis. Relevant works of literature were obtained from the Scopus database between 2014 and 2021. The VOSviewer and Bibliometrix tools were used for analysis through various visualization forms. This study is concerned with the annual publication trends, co-authorship networks among countries, authors, and scientific journals. The co-occurrence network of the authors’ keywords was analyzed for potential future directions of the field. Authors started to contribute to publications in 2016, and the research domain has maintained its growth rate since. The United States and China have strong research collaboration strengths. Only a few studies use bibliometric analysis in this research area. This study provides a recent review on this fast-growing field to highlight status and trends using scientific visualization. It is hoped that the findings will assist researchers in identifying and exploring the potential emerging areas in the related field.