Three‐dimensional (3D) brain tumor segmentation is a clinical requirement for brain tumor diagnosis and radiotherapy planning. This is a challenging task due to variation in type, size, location, and shape of tumors. Several methods such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm formed a topological relationship for the slices that converts 2D images into 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images which does not provide accurate results and they depend on the number of input sections, positions, and the shape of the MRI images. In this article, we propose an efficient 3D brain tumor segmentation technique called modified particle swarm optimization. Also, segmentation results are compared with Darwinian particle swarm optimization (DPSO) and fractional‐order Darwinian particle swarm optimization (FODPSO) approaches. The experimental results show that our method succeeded 3D segmentation with 97.6% of accuracy rate more efficient if compared with the DPSO and FODPSO methods with 78.1% and 70.21% for the case of T1‐C modality.