A Bibliometric Analysis of Knowledge Distillation in Medical Image Segmentation

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis and systematic review to examine research trends in the application of knowledge distillation for medical image segmentation. A total of 806 studies from 343 distinct sources, published between 2019 and 2023, were analyzed using Publish or Perish and VOSviewer, with data retrieved from Scopus and Google Scholar. The findings indicate a rising trend in publications indexed in Scopus, whereas a decline was observed in Google Scholar. Citation analysis revealed that the United States and China emerged as the leading contributors in terms of both publication volume and citation impact. Previous research predominantly focused on optimizing knowledge distillation techniques and their implementation in resource-constrained devices. Keyword analysis demonstrated that medical image segmentation appeared most frequently with 144 occurrences, followed by medical imaging with 110 occurrences. This study highlights emerging research opportunities, particularly in leveraging knowledge distillation for U-Net architectures with large-scale datasets and integrating transformer models to enhance medical image segmentation performance