In this article, we examine the use of several segmentation algorithms for medical image classification. This work detects the cancer region from magnetic resonance (MR) images in earlier stage. This is accomplished in three stages. In first stage, four kinds of region‐based segmentation techniques are used such as K‐means clustering algorithm, expectation–maximization algorithm, partial swarm optimization algorithm, and fuzzy c‐means algorithm. In second stage, 18 texture features are extracting using gray level co‐occurrence matrix (GLCM). In stage three, classification is based on multi‐class support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Finally, the performance analysis of SVM classifier is analyzed using the four types of segmentation algorithm for a group of 200 patients (32—Glioma, 32—Meningioma, 44—Metastasis, 8—Astrocytoma, 72—Normal). The experimental results indicate that EM is an efficient segmentation method with 100% accuracy. In SVM, quadratic and RBF (σ = 0.5) kernel methods provide the highest classification accuracy compared to all other SVM kernel methods. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 26, 196–208, 2016