Topics and trends in artificial intelligence assisted human brain research

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 6;15(4):e0231192. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231192. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) assisted human brain research is a dynamic interdisciplinary field with great interest, rich literature, and huge diversity. The diversity in research topics and technologies keeps increasing along with the tremendous growth in application scope of AI-assisted human brain research. A comprehensive understanding of this field is necessary to assess research efficacy, (re)allocate research resources, and conduct collaborations. This paper combines the structural topic modeling (STM) with the bibliometric analysis to automatically identify prominent research topics from the large-scale, unstructured text of AI-assisted human brain research publications in the past decade. Analyses on topical trends, correlations, and clusters reveal distinct developmental trends of these topics, promising research orientations, and diverse topical distributions in influential countries/regions and research institutes. These findings help better understand scientific and technological AI-assisted human brain research, provide insightful guidance for resource (re)allocation, and promote effective international collaborations.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Bibliometrics*
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Brain Mapping / trends*
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Humans
  • Interdisciplinary Research
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Neurobiology / trends*
  • Publications

Grants and funding

This study was supported by One-off Special Fund from Central and Faculty Fund in Support of Research from 2019/20 to 2021/22 (MIT02/19-20) of The Education University of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31800908 and 31970981), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2018A0303130235). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.