Clustered microcalcifications in X-ray mammograms are an important sign for the diagnosis of breast cancer. A shape-based method, which is based on the morphological features of clustered microcalcifications, is proposed for classifying clustered microcalcifications into benign or malignant categories. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed shape features, clinical mammograms were used to compare the classification performance of the proposed shape features with those of conventional textural features, such as the spatial gray-leve dependence method and the wavelet-based method. Image features extracted from these methods were used as inputs to a three-layer backpropagation neural network classifier. The classification performance of features extracted by each method was studied by using receiver operating-characteristics analysis. The proposed shape features were shown to be superior to the conventional textural features with respect to classification accuracy.