Arie Nakhmani, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,  recently received a short-term $85,000 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a multi-university project to improve software that processes data from the glymphatic and lymphatic systems of the brain.

Nakhmani is the PI for the UAB portion of the project, which will last seven months and also includes Helene Benveniste, Ph.D. (Yale University; Anesthesiology), and Allen Tannenbaum, Ph.D. (Stony Brook University; Computer Science).

“The glymphatic and lymphatic systems control fluid and waste disposal from the central nervous system and are therefore pivotal for sustaining a healthy brain,” Nakhmani said. “A computational source code has been developed to process glymphatic-lymphatic data, which is of interest to the user community studying the two systems.”

The goal of the project is to refine the existing software framework and convert it into a user-friendly Python-based package that will then be integrated into a plug-in-based graphical user interface (GUI) and tested for operational efficiency and usability.