A Quarter-Century of Synthetic Data in Healthcare: Unveiling Trends with Structural Topic Modeling

Data-driven approaches are transforming healthcare, yet acquisition of comprehensive datasets is hindered by high costs, privacy regulations, and ethical concerns. To address these challenges, synthetic data, artificially generated datasets that mimic the statistical properties of real-world data, provides a promising solution. Despite its growing adoption, the thematic landscape of synthetic data research in healthcare remains underexplored. Therefore, we applied structural topic modeling (STM) to map the research landscape of synthetic data in healthcare, revealing prevalent topics and tracking their evolution over time and across geographic locations. PubMed publications from 2000-2024 containing “synthetic data,” “artificial data,” or “simulated data” in the title/abstract were retrieved. After preprocessing the text (lowercasing, punctuation/stopword removal, stemming), structural topic modeling (STM) was performed using year and continent as covariates. The optimal number of topics (K=10) was determined using held-out likelihood and interpretability. Topic prevalence, temporal trends, and inter-topic correlations were analyzed using stacked area charts and network analysis. Analysis of 14,788 PubMed articles (2000-2024) revealed a tenfold increase in publications. Geographically, North America (48.6%) and Europe (33.5%) were primary contributors, but Asia’s share steadily rose from 2.9% to 23.1%. STM identified ten key topics, grouped into Biomedical Imaging & Signal Processing (25.2%), Synthetic Data Applications in Biomedical Research (17.7%), Computational & Statistical Methods (23.9%), and Genomics & Evolutionary Biology (33.2%) themes. We observed gradual declines in initially prominent topics including “Bayesian Modelling” (23.1% to 9.9%), “Neuroimaging” (16.0% to 9.3%), and “Image Simulation” (17.7% to 9.1%), giving ascendancy to “Synthetic Data Generation” (2.2% to 27.1%) and “Disease Modeling and Public Health” (4.8% to 11.9%) by 2024. Synthetic data research in healthcare has experienced increasing interest, marked by shifts in geographic distribution and dynamic evolution of key topics. Realizing the full potential of synthetic data requires fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations, implementing bias mitigation strategies, and establishing equitable partnerships.