BACKGROUND Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated into almost every aspect of our lives and is rapidly changing our way of life. Recently, the new generation of AI taking machine learning and particularly deep convolutional neural network theories as the core technology, has stronger learning ability and independent learning evolution ability, combined with a large amount of learning data, breaks through the bottleneck limit of model accuracy, and makes the model efficient use. OBJECTIVE To identify the 100 most cited papers in artificial intelligence in medical imaging, we performed a comprehensive bibliometric analysis basing on the literature search on Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). METHODS The 100 top-cited articles published in “AI, Medical imaging” journals were identified using the Science Citation Index Database. The articles were further reviewed, and basic information was collected, including the number of citations, journals, authors, publication year, and field of study. RESULTS The highly cited articles in AI were cited between 72 and 1,554 times. The majority of them were published in three major journals: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Medical Image Analysis and Medical Physics. The publication year ranged from 2002 to 2019, with 66% published in a three-year period (2016 to 2018). Publications from the United States (56%) were the most heavily cited, followed by those from China (15%) and Netherlands (10%). Radboud University Nijmegen from Netherlands, Harvard Medical School in USA, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong in China produced the highest number of publications (n=6). Computer science (42%), clinical medicine (35%), and engineering (8%) were the most common fields of study. CONCLUSIONS Citation analysis in the field of artificial intelligence in medical imaging reveals interesting information about the topics and trends negotiated by researchers and elucidates which characteristics are required for a paper to attain a “classic” status. Clinical science articles published in highimpact specialized journals are most likely to be cited in the field of artificial intelligence in medical imaging.