Sounding like something out of a horror flick, Dr. Sam Parnia, head of intensive care at Stony Brook University hospital in New York, is making the claim that people can be brought back from the dead.

We may soon be rescuing people from death’s clutches hours, or even longer, after they have actually died,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.

He also claimed that Sopranos star James Gandolfini, who died of a massive heart attack in Rome last month, might have survived if he was in New York. By cooling the body down to preserve brain cells while keeping oxygen in the blood, he says it buys time to find the problem and restart the heart.

I believe if he died here, he could still be alive,” he told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. “We’d cool him down, pump oxygen to the tissues, which prevents them from dying. Clinically dead, he could then be cared for by the cardiologist. He would make an angiogram, find the clot, take it out, put in a stent and we would restart the heart.”

Dr. Parnia’s new book on resuscitation science, called “Erasing Death,” which was met with mostly favorable reader reviews, also tells the story with detailed accounts and examples.

Of course we can’t rescue everybody and many people with heart attacks have other major problems,” he said. “But if all the latest medical technologies and training had been implemented, which clearly hasn’t been done, then in principle the only people who should die and stay dead are those that have an underlying condition that is untreatable. A heart attack is treatable. Blood loss as well. A terminal cancer isn’t, neither are many infections with multi-resistant pathogens. In these cases, even if we’d restart the heart, it would stop again and again.”

My basic message: The death we commonly perceive today in 2013 is a death that can be reversed,” Dr. Parnia said.  “Most, but not all of our patients, get discharged with no neurological damage whatsoever.”

He added that there is a wide misconception regarding what happens when the heart stops. According to him, the brain does not quickly suffer from damage within three to five minutes, as most people believe.

In the past decade we have seen tremendous progress,” he said. “With today’s medicine, we can bring people back to life up to one, maybe two hours, sometimes even longer, after their heart stopped beating and they have thus died by circulatory failure. In the future, we will likely get better at reversing death.”