Application of artificial intelligence chatbots in the medical field: latent dirichlet allocation analyses.

Abstract

To identify research topics in medical chatbots and analyze their temporal trends, geographic distributions, and journal preferences. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was applied to 9,650 publications (1986-2024), extracting eight core topics integrated with time-series analysis, geographic statistics, and journal associations. Eight topics were identified. Temporal trends revealed three phases: technology incubation (2000-2015), rapid breakthrough (2015-2020), and application consolidation (2020-2024). Geographically, the United States, China, and the United Kingdom dominated research output (46.0%). Journal analysis highlighted Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (7.1%), Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) (5.4%), and IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (IEEE JBHI) (3.2%) as top contributors, with JMIR and JAMIA reinforcing clinical informatics and digital therapeutics. Research on medical chatbots needs to balance technical feasibility and clinical value. Future research should focus on three directions: developing validation frameworks for leveraging large language models in clinical applications (LLMs), establishing transnational data-sharing infrastructure, and creating ethical governance mechanisms that ensure responsible innovation while maintaining health equity.