According to discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) and combining DPSO with the mutation operator of the genetic algorithm, a new discrete particle swarm optimization (NDPSO) algorithm is proposed. Then a detection method that employs NDPSO and parallel inference cancellation (PIC) algorithm in vertical bell-labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) systems is proposed. Such a hybridization of the NDPSO with the PIC can further improve the performance of the NDPSO. To speed up the convergence of the NDPSO, the zero force (ZF) output is used as an initial particle position of the NDPSO. Analyses and simulation results show that the proposed detection method has lower computational complexity than the optimal detection approach and has better detection performance than the suboptimal detection approaches, and is also a good idea for finding a new method to solve the detection problem in V-BLAST systems.