This letter proposes a novel scheme of joint antenna combination and symbol detection in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, which simultaneously determines the antenna combination coefficients to lower the RF chains and designs the minimum bit error rate (MBER) detector to mitigate the interference. The joint decision statistic, however, is highly nonlinear and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to reduce the computational overhead. Simulations show that the new approach yields satisfactory performance with reduced computational overhead compared with pervious works.