  Cephalometric tracing method is usually used in orthodontic diagnosis and
treatment planning. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework
to automatically detect anatomical landmarks in cephalometric X-ray images. We
train the deep encoder-decoder for landmark detection, and combine global
landmark configuration with local high-resolution feature responses. The
proposed frame-work is based on 2-stage u-net, regressing the multi-channel
heatmaps for land-mark detection. In this framework, we embed attention
mechanism with global stage heatmaps, guiding the local stage inferring, to
regress the local heatmap patches in a high resolution. Besides, the Expansive
Exploration strategy improves robustness while inferring, expanding the
searching scope without increasing model complexity. We have evaluated our
framework in the most widely-used public dataset of landmark detection in
cephalometric X-ray images. With less computation and manually tuning, our
framework achieves state-of-the-art results.
