Bibliometric analysis of transcranial Doppler ultrasound

Background: Transcranial Doppler (TCD) ultrasound is a valuable noninvasive diagnostic tool for assessing the cerebral vasculature and has been widely used in clinical care and research settings. However, no systematic reviews have investigated the development history, global landscape, and trend evolution at the macroscopic level in this field. Therefore, this study employs bibliometric techniques to analyze TCD publications from 1990 to 2025 (search date: November 28, 2025), investigating international cooperation networks, knowledge foundations, research hotspots, and future developmental trends. Methods: Literature retrieval and screening were conducted based on the Web of Science Core Collection database. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were employed to perform collaboration network analysis, co-citation analysis, co-occurrence clustering, and burst detection across countries, regions, institutions, journals, authors, references, and keywords within the included literature. Results: A total of 4522 articles were included. The analysis showed that the research hotspots in this field have deepened from disease diagnosis to mechanistic exploration and are now expanding toward frontiers such as perioperative monitoring and cognitive neuroscience. Conclusions: Core literature has integrated the theoretical framework of TCD to evaluate cerebral vascular function and promote the development of the field. In the future, it will be necessary to strengthen interdisciplinary integration – particularly with bioengineering and signal processing for artificial intelligence-driven analysis, cognitive psychology and neuroimaging for neurovascular coupling studies, and critical care medicine and data science for biomarker development – and international cooperation to further expand the application of TCD in emerging scenarios.