2025 Poster Presentations
P185: DETERMINING TRENDS IN SKULL BASE NEUROSURGERY USING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND MACHINE LEARNING
Ali A Mohamed, MS1; Emma Sargent, BS1; Brandon Lucke-Wold, MD, PhD2; 1Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Florida Atlantic University; 2Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery, University of Florida
Introduction: Neurosurgery remains a rapidly advancing field, particularly with respect to skull base neurosurgery. With an increasing publication rate and a wide breath of advancements, it is reasonable to assume the literature will be representative of the growing and declining aspects of skull base neurosurgery.
Objective: Thus, we developed a topic modeling algorithm to explore trends in prominent topics of skull base 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 were pre-processed then analyzed using BERTopic for identifying all topic with a minimum of 50 articles per topic. Topics were then manually assigned to one of the following topics: adjuvant therapy, anterior skull base / orbit, basic science, cavernous sinus / middle fossa, chordoma, clivus /craniocervical junction, head and neck tumors - nonsinonasal malignancy, lateral skull base / CPA / jugular foramen, meningioma, paraganglioma, pediatrics, pituitary adenoma, reconstruction / CSF leak, sella / suprasellar, sinonasal malignancy, surgical approaches and technology, training and education, value based care / quality of life, and vestibular schwannoma. Topics likely to have overlap with other neurosurgical subdisciplines, such as “pediatrics” and “basic science”, were excluded. Topic trends were visualized by graphic representation.
Results: Topic modeling identified 226 topics that were manually mapped to the topics anterior skull base / orbit, cavernous sinus / middle fossa, chordoma, clivus /craniocervical junction, lateral skull base / CPA / jugular foramen, meningioma, paraganglioma, pituitary adenoma, sella / suprasellar, and vestibular schwannoma. Meningioma demonstrated the most positive upwards trend, followed by vestibular schwannoma and pituitary adenoma (Figure 1). There was particular growth in topic volume onwards from 2015. Chordoma, lateral skull base / CPA / jugular foramen, and paraganglioma demonstrated modest and consistent publication volume, with a similar uptick in number of publications onwards from 2015.
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Conclusion: Trends in skull base neurosurgery reflect recent advancements in specific subdisciplines over the years. Understanding these trends provides valuable insights into the current state and future directions of skull base neurosurgery as an evolving field.