Department of Radiology

About:

Salvatore J.A. Sclafani, MD received his Bachelor of Science from Fordham University in 1968 and undertook his medical education at the Upstate campus of SUNY, graduating in 1972. He completed his residency in Diagnostic Radiology at Downstate/Kings County in 1976. He is a diplomate of the American College of Radiology with a certificate of added qualifications in Interventional Radiology. He is a Fellow of the Society of Interventional Radiology and a member of numerous other medical societies. He is a past President of the American Society of Emergency Radiology.

Dr. Sclafani has published more than 150 papers in scientific journals and authored or co-authored more than 20 textbooks. He is currently the Section editor of Radiology for the Journal of Trauma and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Interventional Radiology, and Emergency Radiology. Dr. Sclafani has presented almost two hundred invited lectures in the United States and has lectured extensively on four continents. He has taught countless radiologists the techniques of Interventional Radiology during his ten visits to the Peoples’ Republic of China.

He is recognized for his work in the uses of Radiology in traumatized and emergency patients and has either developed techniques or set standards for the use of Interventional Radiology in the control of hemorrhage after trauma. He is most recognized for his development of a method of treating without the use of open surgery patients who have sustained a ruptured spleen. Other collaborations have led to an awareness of the value of physiological monitoring of the injured elderly, a non-operative approach to exsanguinating hemorrhage after pelvic fractures and management schemes for vascular injuries of the head and neck.

In 1989 Dr. Sclafani became an honorary police surgeon of the New York Police Department after a celebrated “save” by Interventional Radiology of a patrolman who had sustained a near fatal gunshot wound of the internal carotid artery. This event brought national public recognition to Downstate and Kings County Hospital as an innovator in trauma care and the techniques were featured in the New York Times Science Section.

Dr. Sclafani has spent his entire career working among the indigent and was honored by the New York Academy of Medicine for his contributions to urban health.

Participating in the Trauma Service of Kings County since 1976, he is its senior member. He served as the Chief of Radiology at Kings County Hospital Center and was the Chairman of the Department of Radiology of the Downstate Medical Center where he directed more than 35 radiologists and 33 residents. He developed New York City’s first DIRECT pathway program, a dedicated four year interventional radiology residency. 

Dr. Sclafani was born and raised in Brooklyn to which he has dedicated his entire career. He currently resides in Park Slope, Brooklyn with his wife, Georgia.  He lived in the pediatric examining room of his father, Anthony Sclafani, MD, in Bensonhurst during the first four years of his life and lived above the waiting room of his father’s office until the age of 13. Thus, he considers the hospitals his second home and its patients his family.