# CLC-YOLO: A Compact Channel-Gated Prototype Network for Real-Time Leakage-Aware Breast Ultrasound Lesion Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31702/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Classification of Alzheimer's Disease: Overview and Reproducible Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07773/) (2019)
- [Why rankings of biomedical image analysis competitions should be interpreted with care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02051/) (2018)
- [Understanding metric-related pitfalls in image analysis validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01790/) (2023)
- [Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03748/) (2026)
- [Cross-validation failure: small sample sizes lead to large error bars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07581/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable breast ultrasound lesion segmentation requires accurate boundaries and evaluation that prevents patients or duplicate images from crossing data splits. We propose Channel Local Contrast (CLC), a compact refinement of the YOLO26 segmentation prototype head. CLC adds a fixed local high-pass residual controlled by 64 zero-initialized, bounded channel gates. Baseline and CLC were compared in five matched folds on each of four breast ultrasound datasets. BUS-BRA used patient-disjoint outer tests with separate inner validation. BUS-UCLM and BrEaST used patient-grouped validation folds; BUSI used duplicate-component groups because patient identifiers are unavailable. Group-macro Dice increased by 1.68, 3.11, 1.12, and 2.45 percentage points on BUS-BRA, BUS-UCLM, BUSI, and BrEaST, respectively. Only the BUS-BRA paired 95% confidence interval excluded zero. CLC adds 64 parameters and 0.0049 giga floating-point operations (GFLOPs). At 640 pixels, single-T4, batch-one, 16-bit floating-point (FP16) TensorRT graph times were 2.1478 ms for CLC and 2.0512 ms for baseline, excluding preprocessing and postprocessing. CLC increased group-macro Dice across all four datasets with a measured T4 forward-pass overhead of 0.0966 ms. Code: https://github.com/mfazrinizar/CLC-YOLO