# 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 Do not publish A and B as overlapping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