Heart disease is one of the most common causes for death among human nations for many years. There have been substantial efforts to reduce heart diseases in the world. It is essential to implement the recent advances of data science to discover any symptoms of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Machine learning (ML) has given scientists a tool to detect early causes of such disease and this survey uses the combination of ML and CVD as a search keyword to determine 200 highly cited articles from the Scopus database. The study performs a survey on the data which were published from 2018 to 2025 and present possible road-map for future studies. The results indicate that a significant number of highly cited articles are published in Open Access journals such as PlosOne, IEEE Access and Scientific Report. In addition, the study presents seven different areas of research which have been under significant progress.
