Microcalcification clusters in mammograms is the significant early sign of breast cancer. Individual clusters are difficult to detect and hence an automatic computer aided mechanism will help the radiologist in detecting the microcalcification clusters in an easy and efficient way. This paper presents a new classification approach for detection of microcalcification in digital mammogram using particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) based clustering technique. Fuzzy C-means clustering technique, well defined for clustering data sets are used in combination with the PSO. We adopt the particle swarm optimization to search the cluster center in the arbitrary data set automatically. PSO can search the best solution from the probability option of the Social-only model and Cognition-only model. This method is quite simple and valid, and it can avoid the minimum local value. The proposed classification approach is applied to a database of 322 dense mammographic images, originating from the MIAS database. Results shows that the proposed PSO-FCM approach gives better detection performance compared to conventional approaches. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.