After completing two-and-a-half years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Andes mountains and Amazon jungles of Ecuador, Dr. Raj Ayyagari graduated from Yale School of Medicine in 2004. He first began training in Urology at the University of Washington, and then chose to pursue a career in image-guided minimally invasive procedural therapy. He went on to complete a residency in Diagnostic Radiology and fellowship in Interventional Radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2011.

The mainstay of Dr. Ayyagari’s contributions over the past decade have been in the field of prostatic artery embolization (PAE). He single-handedly developed one of the first and largest PAE practices in the country. His has risen to prominence not only because he has reported his expansive data in top IR and Urology meetings and journals, but also because of his genuine collaborative spirit for working with those within and beyond his specialty.

In recent years, Dr. Ayyagari has pioneered minimally invasive treatments for prostate cancer. He previously implemented one of the few in-bore MRI-guided prostate biopsy programs in the country. His trans-perineal approach significantly improves on the infection risk of the standard trans-rectal approach, while allowing direct visualization and sampling of suspicious lesions seen on diagnostic prostate MRI scans. Even more importantly, Dr. Ayyagari recently partnered with urologists to build one of a handful of centers in the world to offer a new MRI-guided transurethral prostate cancer ablation procedure, a procedure which promises to become a true game-changer in the treatment of prostate cancer.

Dr. Ayyagari had been on faculty at Yale School of Medicine and practicing at Yale-New Haven Hospital, until recently when he returned with his family to the Boston area. He is now a faculty member at Boston University School of Medicine and interventional radiologist at Boston Medical Center.