Diffusion tensor imaging from past to present: A bibliometric analysis with trending topics and global productivity during 1980-2022

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides increasing opportunities for clinicians. As bibliometric studies define trends of novel modality applications, this study on DTI analyzed global productivity, most prolific institutions, and research areas. Articles obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) database were analyzed with the VOSviewer program, biblioshiny library in the R studio software bibliometrix package, exponential smoothing estimator, and with the SPSS (Version: 22.0) statistical software. In descending order, the United States, China, and Germany were the top 3 countries publishing DTI research. In descending order, the top 3 most productive institutions were California, Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. Trend topics include traumatic brain injury, tract-based spatial statistics, fractional anisotropy, prognosis, machine learning, autism, white matter integrity and microstructure and Parkinson's disease. According to the estimations, 345 DTI articles will be published in 2025 (95% CI: 254-437). This study indicates the ever-growing employment of DTI in clinical and basic sciences.