Abstract: Tumor relapse and metastasis are the main reasons for cancer related deaths. Circulating tumor cells(CTCs) are believed to be correlated to tumor metastasis closely. As the multiplicity of CTCs surface molecule, CTCs have potential to provide sufficient information in clinical diagnosis, prognosis and individualized cancer treatment. The methods of CTCs enrichment are considered to be extremely important because the clinical application and molecular characterization of CTCs are restricted to it. Nowadays, the technologies that are proposed to isolate CTCs are developing rapidly. This paper mainly summarizes the progression of the enrichment and detecting methods of CTCs.