[3] His PhD thesis under the guidance of Hans Strehlow at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry was devoted to the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy for a characterization of the molecular dynamics of hydrated ions in complex solutions.
In 1982 the Biomedical NMR group was formally founded and from 1984 to 1992 primarily financed via two substantial grants from the Ministry for Research and Technology of the German Federal Government.
Up to date royalties from the group's patents serve to fully support all activities of the Biomedizinische NMR Forschungs GmbH (not-for-profit) which was founded in 1993 as an independent research unit associated with the Göttingen MPI.
In 1997 Frahm became adjunct professor at the Faculty for Chemistry of the Georg-August-University in Göttingen and in 2011 External Member of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization.
Apart from cardiac applications and quantitative measurements of blood flow in real time, novel possibilities range from studies of joint movements, bowel motility and swallowing mechanics (e.g., dysphagia and reflux disorders) to speech generation and brass playing.
More recently, the algorithm for regularized nonlinear inversion (NLINV) has been extended to allow for model-based reconstructions of quantitative parametric maps directly from suitable sets of MRI raw data.
The results offer fundamental advantages in comparison to conventional mapping methods which are based on serial image reconstructions followed by pixelwise fitting.