| # Venue targeting |
|
|
| ## Option A — Full method paper (recommended primary) |
| **Venue:** MICCAI / IEEE TMI / Medical Image Analysis. |
| **Framing:** label-free lesion subspaces for token-economical medical imaging; the negative result |
| is §6, not the headline. Sells the cross-modality/backbone generality + certificate + routing. |
| **Why it survives review:** every claim is gated with locked thresholds and CI tests; the |
| precondition sentence (helps where density localizes the lesion; liver = characterized failure) |
| preempts the obvious probe; the negative result demonstrates rigor rather than weakness. |
|
|
| ## Option B — Negative-results / short paper (strong standalone) |
| **Venue:** MIDL (short / negative results track), or a "lessons learned" workshop, or NeurIPS |
| ML4H. |
| **Title:** "Rank-Based Coverage Objectives Fail for Rare-Lesion Retention: A Mechanism." |
| **Core:** `NEGATIVE_RESULT.md` — the ablation + the spanning-vs-concentration mechanism + |
| three convergent lines (ablation, Gate-2 tie, flat C*). Transferable warning for RankMe-flavored |
| medical SSL. A negative result with a mechanism gets cited; this is that. |
| |
| ## Option C — Mid-layer probe note |
| **Venue:** SPIE Medical Imaging (aligns with the existing representation-coverage probe paper). |
| **Core:** Finding 1 (lesion signal lives mid-layer; final 0.565 → block-3 0.871). **Reconcile with |
| the existing SPIE probe paper**: if that probe read final-layer features it was looking in the |
| wrong place; merge or cross-cite so the two reinforce and do not read as salami-slicing. The |
| covtoken negative result gives clean topical separation between the two. |
| |
| ## Recommended split |
| A as the main paper; fold Finding 1 into the SPIE probe paper (C) with cross-citation; keep B in |
| reserve if A's reviewers want the negative spun out. Do not publish A and B as overlapping |
| positives — B is the negative slice of A, clearly fenced. |
| |
| ## Figures (in `figures/`) |
| - fig1 layer ablation (Finding 1) - fig2 cross-modality AUROC (Finding 2) |
| - fig3 pruning gains (Finding 3) - fig4 floor ablation / negative (Finding 4) |
| - fig5 conformal retention certificate |
| |
