Tracking the Presence of Software as a Medical Device in US Food and Drug Administration Databases: Retrospective Data Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Software as a medical device (SaMD) has gained the attention of medical device regulatory bodies as the prospects of standalone software for use in diagnositic and therapeutic settings have increased. However, to date, figures related to SaMD have not been made available by regulators, which limits the understanding of how prevalent these devices are and what actions should be taken to regulate them. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to empirically evaluate the market approvals and clearances related to SaMD and identify adverse incidents related to these devices. METHODS: Using databases managed by the US medical device regulator, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), we identified the counts of SaMD registered with the FDA since 2016 through the use of product codes, mapped the path SaMD takes toward classification, and recorded adverse events. RESULTS: SaMD does not seem to be registered at a rate dissimilar to that of other medical devices; thus, adverse events for SaMD only comprise a small portion of the total reported number. CONCLUSIONS: Although SaMD has been identified in the literature as an area of development, our analysis suggests that this growth has been modest. These devices are overwhelmingly classified as moderate to high risk, and they take a very particular path to that classification. The digital revolution in health care is less pronounced when evidence related to SaMD is considered. In general, the addition of SaMD to the medical device market seems to mimic that of other medical devices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".