Abstract. It is important to detect abnormal brains accurately and early. The wavelet-energy (WE) was a successful feature descriptor that achieved excellent performance in various applications; hence, we proposed a WE based new approach for automated abnormal detection, and reported its preliminary results in this study. The kernel support vector machine (KSVM) was used as the classifier, and quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) was introduced to optimize the weights of the SVM. The results based on a 5 × 5-fold cross validation showed the performance of the proposed WE + QPSO-KSVM was superior to "DWT + PCA + BP-NN", "DWT + PCA + RBF-NN", "DWT + PCA + PSO-KSVM", "WE + BPNN", "WE + KSVM", and "DWT + PCA + GA-KSVM" w.r.t. sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The work provides a novel means to detect abnormal brains with excellent performance.