Discovering the evolution of artificial intelligence in cancer research using dynamic topic modeling

The rapid growth of healthcare data in recent years calls for more advanced and efficient analytic techniques. Artificial intelligence facilitates finding insightful patterns in massive high-dimensional data. Considering the latest movements towards using machine learning and deep learning techniques in the medical domain, in this study, we focused on the publications in which researchers employed artificial intelligence techniques for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Using dynamic topic modeling and natural language processing techniques, we analyzed the contents and trends of more than 12,000 scientific publications within the period of 2000 to 2018, extracted from two different sources, i.e., Elsevier’s Scopus and PubMed. While drawing the landscape of cancer research, our results also shed light on the evolution of artificial intelligence techniques and algorithms used for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Our findings confirm that modern computer science algorithms are being widely applied to extract patterns from large-scale medical images to cure different types of cancer with a special focus on deep learning techniques in recent years.