AUTHOR=Yang Hongwei , Song Wenqu , Jiang Tiankai , Wang Chuanhao , Zhang Luping , Cai Zhian , Sun Yuhan , Zhao Qing , Sun Yuyu 
  
TITLE=An improved YOLOv10-based framework for knee MRI lesion detection with enhanced small object recognition and low contrast feature extraction
  
JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
  
VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2025
  
YEAR=2026
  
URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2025.1675834
  
DOI=10.3389/frai.2025.1675834
  
ISSN=2624-8212
  
ABSTRACT=Rationale and objectivesTo address the challenges in detecting anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) lesions in knee MRI examinations, including difficulties in identifying tiny lesions, insufficient extraction of low-contrast features, and poor modeling of irregular lesion morphologies, and to provide a precise and efficient auxiliary diagnostic tool for clinical practice.Materials and methodsAn enhanced framework based on YOLOv10 is constructed. The backbone network is optimized using the C2f-SimAM module to enhance multi-scale feature extraction and spatial attention; an Adaptive Spatial Fusion (ASF) module is introduced in the neck to better fuse multi-scale spatial features; and a novel hybrid loss function combining Focal-EIoU and KPT Loss is employed. To ensure rigorous statistical evaluation, we utilized a five-fold cross-validation strategy on a dataset of 917 cases.ResultsEvaluation on the KneeMRI dataset demonstrates that the proposed model achieves statistically significant improvements over standard YOLOv10, Faster R-CNN, and Transformer-based detectors (RT-DETR). Specifically, mAP@0.5 is increased by 1.3% (p < 0.05) compared to the standard YOLOv10, and mAP@0.5:0.95 is improved by 2.5%. Qualitative analysis further confirms the model's ability to reduce false negatives in small, low-contrast tears.ConclusionThis framework effectively connects general object detection models with the specific requirements of medical imaging, providing a precise and efficient solution for diagnosing ACL injuries in routine clinical workflows.