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Hi, author here! Completely agree, I would love to see the FDA publish an official dataset of predicate device relationships. I'm not sure if they have this data available internally, but if not, they could validate my dataset and republish it, which might be easier than starting from scratch.

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You did not have to scrape the pdfs using the website link. They have bulk downloads indexed by year (IIRC). I remember grabbing these because I had to OCR a bunch of summaries to extract data for some NLP I was running. Also, IIRC grabbing the predicates was pretty easy w/ tesseract.

I'd love to take a look, do you have a link? I couldn't find any bulk downloads for this, but that would definitely be useful!

I guess I spoke too soon. I found a resource here: https://open.fda.gov/apis/downloads/

I do use this resource for 510k.fyi to populate the device and recall data, but unfortunately it does not contain the 510(k) summaries, or even links to them. The web scraping was still required to get those documents so that I could run OCR on them.

Since the website is open source, there's even a github issue confirming this: https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/200

Yes, it's all about how easy it is to access this data. Many of these older device submissions are scanned PDFs that need to be OCRd.

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