Self-hosted redaction service¶

openmed.service.redaction_app provides a small local FastAPI surface for redacting text and explicit UTF-8 files. The default redactor is deterministic and uses only local standard-library patterns; importing or starting the app does not download a model or make a network request.

The review page at /review displays policy, aggregate entity counts, and artifact status only. It never renders source text, redacted text, file paths, or entity surfaces. The service also retains only that aggregate state in memory. Errors use content-free messages, and the file endpoint writes the redacted artifact to the caller-selected output path.

Start locally¶

Install the service extra and run it on loopback:

uv pip install -e ".[service]"
uvicorn openmed.service.redaction_app:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080

The app accepts only loopback Host headers and intentionally has no remote authentication or TLS surface. Do not bind it to 0.0.0.0, expose it through a reverse proxy, or publish its port. JSON request bodies are rejected before parsing when they exceed the configured encoded-byte limit; decoded text and file reads have a separate character limit.

The default baseline recognizes common email, phone, date, IP address, SSN, name-after-a-label, and record-ID shapes. It is intentionally conservative and does not replace a clinical privacy review or a broader locally hosted model. Policy names are validated against OpenMed's policy registry and recorded in the counts-only review state. The baseline does not by itself implement every detector or action in those full policy profiles.

The method field supports mask, remove, replace, hash, shift_dates, and format_preserve. Date shifting is deterministic for a caller-supplied integer seed; non-date identifiers remain masked. Hashing and format-preserving output retain linkability or shape information, so use them only when that tradeoff is intentional.

Redact text¶

Text can be returned directly, or written to an explicit output location. The example uses synthetic values only:

curl -sS http://127.0.0.1:8080/redact/text \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "text": "Patient Synthetic Person, email synthetic@example.test.",
    "policy": "strict_no_leak"
  }'

The response contains the redacted text and aggregate counts. When output_path is supplied, the same artifact is written there and the response reports a content hash and written status.

Redact an explicit file¶

The file endpoint accepts existing UTF-8 input and a separate output path. The output directory is created when needed:

curl -sS http://127.0.0.1:8080/redact/file \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "input_path": "/work/synthetic-note.txt",
    "output_path": "/work/out/redacted-note.txt",
    "policy": "strict_no_leak"
  }'

The file response does not echo either file path or source content. The caller already knows the explicit output location and can verify the returned SHA-256 hash. Input and output paths must differ.

Use an already-provisioned local model¶

For broader detection, inject a model that is already available on disk. The service does not provision or download that model:

from openmed.service.redaction_app import create_app

app = create_app(local_model_path="/models/pii-model")

Alternatively, pass a callable with redactor=. It may return a core de-identification result, a RedactionResult, a mapping containing redacted_text, or a string. Only redacted text and aggregate labels are retained by the service adapter.

This service is a local workflow component, not a compliance certification or a clinical decision system. Keep source artifacts in controlled storage and use synthetic data for development and tests.