---
title: "Medical image segmentation research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “medical image segmentation” appeared in 881 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (870), statistics (5) and operations research (2)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/medical-image-segmentation
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/medical-image-segmentation.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “medical image segmentation” appeared in 881 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (870), statistics (5) and operations research (2). (as of 2026-11-05)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-05T06:02:37+09:00
window: 2026-10-07 to 2026-11-05
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “medical image segmentation”

[Browse research topics](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/directory/page/4.md)

Research on “medical image segmentation” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “medical image segmentation” appeared in 881 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (870), statistics (5) and operations research (2).
- 222 of them were published in 2025, against 8 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (34), Fudan University (26) and Sichuan University (20).
- The journals publishing most of them were Medical Image Analysis (115), Expert Systems with Applications (103) and Pattern Recognition (80).
- The most-cited of them is “MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net architecture for multimodal biomedical image segmentation” (Neural Networks, 2019), with 2,329 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 8 | 8 | 15 | 44 | 50 | 77 | 78 | 156 | 219 | 215 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 8 | 8 | 18 | 44 | 52 | 78 | 79 | 156 | 222 | 216 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Medical Image Analysis](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/medical-image-analysis.md) | 115 |
| 2 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 103 |
| 3 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 80 |
| 4 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 61 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 51 |
| 6 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 34 |
| 7 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 29 |
| 8 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 29 |
| 9 | [Image and Vision Computing](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/image-and-vision-computing.md) | 21 |
| 10 | [Computer Vision and Image Understanding](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computer-vision-and-image-understanding.md) | 18 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 34 |
| 2 | [Fudan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/fudan-university.md) | 26 |
| 3 | [Sichuan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sichuan-university.md) | 20 |
| 4 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 20 |
| 5 | Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology | 17 |
| 6 | [Anhui University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/anhui-university.md) | 16 |
| 7 | [Hong Kong University of Science and Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-university-of-science-and-technology.md) | 16 |
| 8 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 16 |
| 9 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 16 |
| 10 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 15 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 503 |
| 2 | United States | 70 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 64 |
| 4 | Hong Kong | 37 |
| 5 | Australia | 35 |
| 6 | India | 30 |
| 7 | Singapore | 22 |
| 8 | France | 21 |
| 9 | Germany | 19 |
| 10 | Canada | 18 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | U-Net | 62 |
| 2 | [semi-supervised learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semi-supervised-learning.md) | 53 |
| 3 | brain tumor segmentation | 50 |
| 4 | skin lesion segmentation | 47 |
| 5 | [multi-scale feature fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multi-scale-feature-fusion.md) | 40 |
| 6 | [pseudo-labeling](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/pseudo-labeling.md) | 38 |
| 7 | [attention mechanism](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism.md) | 34 |
| 8 | Mamba | 30 |
| 9 | encoder-decoder architecture | 30 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,329 | 27.1 | [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net architecture for multimodal biomedical image segmentation](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2019.08.025) | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 2019-09-04 | Nabil Ibtehaz, M. Sohel Rahman |
| 2 | 1,437 | 52.3 | [TransUNet: Rethinking the U-Net architecture design for medical image segmentation through the lens of transformers](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2024.103280) | [Medical Image Analysis](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/medical-image-analysis.md) | 2024-07-22 | Jieneng Chen, Jieru Mei, Xianhang Li et al. |
| 3 | 1,065 | 40.2 | [Medical Image Segmentation Review: The Success of U-Net](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2024.3435571) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2024-08-21 | Reza Azad, Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam, Amelie Rauland et al. |
| 4 | 879 | 11.5 | [Deep semantic segmentation of natural and medical images: a review](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-020-09854-1) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2020-06-13 | Saeid Asgari Taghanaki, Kumar Abhishek, Joseph Cohen et al. |
| 5 | 783 | 11.3 | [Generative adversarial network: An overview of theory and applications](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjimei.2020.100004) | [International Journal of Information Management Data Insights](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-information-management-data-insights.md) | 2021-01-27 | Alankrita Aggarwal, Mamta Mittal, Gopi Battineni |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “medical image segmentation”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/medical-image-segmentation

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-medical-image-segmentation,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “medical image segmentation”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/medical-image-segmentation}},
  urldate = {2026-11-05},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).