Francesco Faletra joins ISMETT Heart Program team

Francesco Faletra is one of the most world-renowned experts in echocardiography.

ISMETT enhances its cardiac imaging service with to the arrival of Dr. Faletra, a leading specialist in the field. Cardiac imaging is a branch of cardiology enabling accurate diagnoses thanks to sophisticated and minimally-invasive techniques such as transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography, cardiac MRI, and cardiac and coronary CT.

Dr. Faletra will serve as Senior Imaging Consultant. According to U.S. online platform Expertscape, Dr. Faletra ranks second world ranking of experts in transesophageal echocardiography. Expertscape is a platform that aggregates information on the scientific activity of experts in every field of medicine and in every corner of the world. The ranking is based on extremely strict criteria: after processing all scientific works published over the last 10 years on PubMed (an independent search engine for biomedical scientific literature) a score is assigned to each publication.

ISMETT, established in Palermo thanks to an international partnership between the Region of Sicily and UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), already has a Clinical Cardiology Unit, an Interventional Cardiology

Unit, and a Cardiac Surgery Unit. The enhanced cardiac imaging program will allow to further expand ISMETT’s heart program.

“We are very happy that Francesco Faletra is joining our team,” says Dr. Michele Pilato, Director of ISMETT’s Heart Center, “this is an important collaboration that will contribute to the growth of the heart program with the establishment of a modern Heart Valve Clinic to assess heart valve disease with the most advanced technologies and minimally-invasive techniques available at ISMETT. As a result of the partnership with UPMC, ISMETT benefits from an ongoing cultural and scientific exchange with one of the most important American heart centers. The arrival of Dr. Faletra at ISMETT will give us the opportunity to offer ever higher standards of care to our patients.”

Francesco Faletra graduated in Medicine and Surgery cum laude at the University of Catania, and specialized in Cardiology at the University of Milan. He began his career at the Cardiology Department “A. De Gasperis” in Milan. Dr Faletra has been the head of the cardiac imaging department at Cardiocentro Ticino in Lugano, Switzerland since 2005. He has published more than 100 scientific articles and several books.