Spine Surgery Topic Trends Determined by Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Introduction: Neurosurgery is a rapidly advancing field, particularly in the area of spine surgery. Given the increasing publication rate and diverse advancements, it is reasonable to expect that the literature will reflect both emerging trends and areas of decline. Thus, we developed a topic modeling algorithm to analyze trends in key topics within spine neurosurgery.

Methods: A dataset of over 185,000 articles collected from a Web of Science database search conducted in April 2024 using the keyword "neurosurgery" was created. Textual data from article titles, keywords, and abstracts from the top 5 neurosurgery journals were pre-processed and then analyzed using BERTopic for identifying all topics with a minimum of 50 articles per topic. Topics were then manually assigned to one of the following spine topics if applicable: basic science, deformity, degenerative, minimally invasive/motion preservation, oncology, peripheral nerve, socioeconomic, and trauma. “Basic science”, “socioeconomic”, and “trauma” were excluded as they demonstrated overlap with other subdisciplines.

Results: Topic modeling identified 226 topics total, 49 of which were related to spine surgery. Topics were manually categorized into deformity, degenerative, minimally invasive/motion preservation, oncology, and peripheral nerve. Peripheral nerve articles demonstrated the most positive uptrend in publication frequency, with particularly rapid growth since 2015 to 2020. Oncology also saw its highest peak in 2020. Minimally invasive/motion preservation showed a steady rise since 2005 and peaked around 2018. Degenerative and deformity topics showed fluctuating trends, with degenerative peaking in the 1990s and again around 2020, and deformity peaking in the early 2000s.

Conclusion : Publication trends in spine neurosurgery reflect evolving research priorities, with peripheral nerve, oncology, and minimally invasive topics showing the most significant growth, peaking around 2020. Examining these trends offers valuable insight into the current state and future directions in spinal neurosurgery research.