Curriculum Learning-Driven YOLO for Tumor Detection in Ultrasound Using Hierarchically Zoomed-In Images

Ultrasound imaging is widely employed for breast cancer detection; however, its diagnostic reliability is often constrained by operator dependence and subjective interpretation. Deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) systems offer potential to improve diagnostic consistency, yet their effectiveness is frequently limited by the scarcity of annotated medical images. This work introduces a training framework to enhance the performance and training stability of a YOLO-based object detection model for breast tumor localization, particularly in data-constrained scenarios. The proposed method integrates a detail-to-context curriculum learning scheme using hierarchically zoomed-in B-mode images, with progression difficulty determined by the tumor-to-background area ratio. A preprocessing step resizes all images to 640 × 640 pixels while preserving aspect ratio to improve intra-dataset consistency. Our evaluation indicates that aspect ratio-preserving resizing is associated with a 2.3% increase in recall and a reduction in the standard deviation of stability metrics by more than 20%. Moreover, the curriculum learning approach reached 97.2% of the final model performance using only 35% of the training data required by conventional methods, while achieving a more balanced precision–recall profile. These findings suggest that the proposed framework holds potential as an effective strategy for developing more robust and efficient tumor detection models, particularly for deployment in resource-limited clinical environments.