Three decades of coronary intravascular ultrasound and optical coherence tomography: A structured narrative review of published bibliometric evidence and trial-driven research phases

Background Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) now sit at the centre of invasive coronary assessment, and intracoronary imaging has been elevated to a Class 1 recommendation for guiding percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in complex lesions. Several bibliometric analyses have mapped adjacent literatures, but their findings have never been assembled and appraised together for the coronary IVUS and OCT field. Objectives To assemble, appraise, and synthesise the published bibliometric evidence describing the coronary IVUS and OCT literature; to place that evidence alongside the trials, technologies, and guideline events that plausibly drove its inflection points; and to specify a reproducible protocol for the formal bibliometric analysis this field still lacks. Methods Structured narrative review reported against the SANRA quality criteria, with search reporting adapted from PRISMA-ScR. PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection were searched from 1 January 1990 to the date of the final search, using two purpose-built search strands: one for published bibliometric or scientometric analyses of intracoronary and closely related optical or ultrasound imaging literatures, and one for the primary trials, meta-analyses, registry studies, and guidelines used to date and interpret literature inflection points. No article-level records were exported to bibliometric software, and no publication counts, citation counts, author or institution rankings, or network maps were generated by the present author. Every quantitative statement in this review is attributed to the source that reported it, and Table 3 maps each principal claim to its supporting reference. Findings Thirty-eight sources were included, of which five were bibliometric analyses covering coronary or ophthalmic OCT, drug-coated balloons, and adjacent domains. None took coronary IVUS as its primary subject, which is itself the clearest finding of this appraisal: the quantitative mapping of this field is markedly OCT-weighted, and the IVUS literature has never been formally mapped. Within the OCT-focused analyses, Japan, the United States, and China were consistently the leading contributors, and the International Journal of Cardiology was the single most prolific outlet for OCT research in acute coronary syndromes. Read against the clinical record, the evidence supports a four-phase account of the field: an IVUS-dominant foundational phase, a comparative-growth phase following the clinical arrival of OCT, an outcomes-driven consolidation phase built on OPINION, ILUMIEN III, ULTIMATE, and IVUS-XPL, and a diversification phase from 2022 onward shaped by ILUMIEN IV, OCTOBER, OCTIVUS, RENOVATE-COMPLEX-PCI, IVUS-ACS, and OCCUPI, and closed by the 2025 guideline upgrade. Conclusions The coronary IVUS and OCT literatures have followed distinct but converging trajectories punctuated by identifiable trial and technology events. The quantitative evidence describing those trajectories remains partial and modality-skewed. The prespecified protocol given here is offered so that the analysis this field needs can be executed and audited by others.