A Bibliometric and Trend Analysis of Applied Technologies in Bioengineering for Additive Manufacturing of Human Organs

Abstract

The escalating demand for organ replacement in the entire world drives researchers and scientists to develop a new technology of 3D bioprinting. The advancement in additive manufacturing, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and 3D printing has made it possible to create tissues and regenerate damaged organs to their standard functionality. Different methods and other combinations are required to come up with a successful production of bio-inks for printing. Trend analysis conveys the rate of acceptance and emerging development in this technology and which aspects affect its continuous development such as ethical and legal issues, safety, risk, and accountabilities. In this study, bibliometric mapping is used to visualize the volume and co-occurrence relations between keywords, the number of citations and journals published from the past 18 years, and the authors who commonly write literature works about 3D bioprinting. The aim of this paper is to present the continuous development of this technology with the increasing number of published research in Scopus. Based on the polynomial growth of the trend, the predicted result shows that the number of publications may reach up to 850 in the year 2032 from the current 208 documents for the year 2021 and only two publications in the year 2003. The challenges that may hinder or slow down the growth of this technology are the following: (1) ethical and regulation issues, (2) policy in clinical practice including its accuracy, (3) unaccepted mechanical properties of materials for bioprinting, (4) process duration, and (5) the high cost of this biotechnology.