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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.

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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.

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

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