The shape prior of target region plays an important role in the deformable model based ultrasound image segmentation methods. To improve the modeling ability of the shape prior model to the target contour deformation details, a novel Gaussian process based statistical shape model is proposed. Firstly, the target contour is represented as a discrete stochastic time series. And then, the properties of Gaussian process are utilized to statistically learn the variations of the target shapes from training set. I...