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

arXiv:2609.31702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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