Matt McCabe, PhD
I’m a data scientist working in healthcare and life sciences. Most of my work is about turning messy real-world data into evidence people can actually use to evaluate products, understand clinical performance, make decisions, or avoid fooling themselves with a polished but irrelevant analysis.
Things I Think About
Real-World Evidence
Clinical data is usually messy in boring but important ways. I like figuring out what it can tell us, what it can’t, and where pretending otherwise gets expensive.
Decision-driven analytics
I’m less interested in analysis that describes a situation than analysis that changes a choice. The useful questions are usually: who is deciding, what could they do, and what would change their mind?
Reproducibility, now with AI
Reproducibile analysis used to mean rerunnable pipelines, organized scripts, and version controlled code. Now AI makes it easier to generate analysis-shaped things, which makes it more important than ever that workflows are inspectiable, rerunnable, and understandable by both humans and machines.
Publications
Closing the Performance Gap Between Generalists and Breast Imaging Specialists Using a Nationally Deployed AI Workflow for Screening Mammography
McCabe M, Wakelin E, Louis L, Ng A, Buist D, Lee C, Sorensen AG, Haslam B. Radiology. In Press.
Equitable impact of an AI-driven breast cancer screening workflow in real-world US-wide deployment
Louis L, Wakelin E, McCabe M, Ng A, Kim J, Lee C, Buist D, Sorensen AG, Haslam B. Nature Health. 2025.
Cognitive Process Models Reveal Meaningful Brain-Behavior Associations in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study Stop-signal Task
Barrows A, Weigard A, McCabe M, Potter A, Garavan H, Allgaier N. J Cogn Neurosci. 2026.
Recalibrating single-study effect sizes using hierarchical Bayesian models
Cao Z, McCabe M, Callas P, et al.; ENIGMA Addiction Working Group. Front Neuroimaging. 2023.
Altered Fast Synaptic Transmission in a Mouse Model of DNM1-Associated Developmental Epileptic Encephalopathy
McCabe MP, Shore AN, Frankel WN, Weston MC. eNeuro. 2021.
Genetic inactivation of mTORC1 or mTORC2 in neurons reveals distinct functions in glutamatergic synaptic transmission
McCabe MP, Cullen ER, Barrows CM, Shore AN, Tooke KI, Laprade KA, Stafford JM, Weston MC. eLife. 2020.
PTEN Loss Increases the Connectivity of Fast Synaptic Motifs and Functional Connectivity in a Developing Hippocampal Network
Barrows CM, McCabe MP, Chen H, Swann JW, Weston MC. J Neurosci. 2017.
Riding the Calcium Wave to a Better Understanding of Ictal Events
McCabe MP, Weston MC. Epilepsy Curr. 2016.
Neural activation patterns underlying basolateral amygdala influence on intra-accumbens opioid-driven consummatory versus appetitive high-fat feeding behaviors in the rat
Parker KE, McCabe MP, Johns HW, Lund DK, Odu F, Sharma R, Thakkar MM, Cornelison DD, Will MJ. Behav Neurosci. 2015.