Should the Use of Adaptive Machine Learning Systems in Medicine be Classified as Research?

A novel advantage of the use of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is their potential to continue learning from new data after implementation in clinical practice. To date, considerations of the ethical questions raised by the design and use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine have, for the most part, been confined to discussion of the so-called "update problem," which concerns how regulators should approach systems whose performance and parameters continue to change even after they have received regulatory approval. In this paper, we draw attention to a prior ethical question: whether the continuous learning that will occur in such systems after their initial deployment should be classified, and regulated, as medical research? We argue that there is a strong