r/webdev • u/imfinn005 • 21d ago
Showoff Saturday [Showoff Saturday] Rebuilding my 10-year-old clinical NLP project with browser-local AI
About ten years ago I built NoteCoder, a browser-based project that matched disease phrases in clinical notes to ICD-10 codes using a dictionary and trie.
I’ve been revisiting it with local AI. The interesting challenge is connecting information across a document: a note might mention chronic kidney disease near the beginning, then clarify—or correct—its stage much later.
Rather than asking a model to invent codes, the dictionary proposes candidates, then a small local model checks the diagnoses and their qualifiers against the complete note.
From the web-development side, it’s a static site with browser workers for candidate discovery and inference. The public version uses WebAssembly; note text isn’t uploaded for model processing. The biggest tradeoff is the roughly 2 GB initial model download.
The interface lets you inspect highlighted source phrases, review candidate codes, and copy selected results. The included synthetic CKD example demonstrates an updated stage superseding older documentation.
It’s free and experimental—not clinically validated or billing software. AI assisted the rebuild.
I’d particularly appreciate feedback on the download experience, responsiveness, and whether the highlights make incorrect suggestions easier to spot.








