Abstract: Breast cancer is a common malignant tumor in women. The clinical value of circulating tumor cell （CTCs） in breast cancer has become one of the focuses in recent years. There are many CTCs detection methods at present leading to huge heterogeneity which limits the widely use of research data. Nowadays， the ‘golden standard’ of CTCs detection method is still the commercial detection system named CELLSEARCH and most of the clinical studies have adopted this system. This paper will only summarize the clinical study of breast cancer CTCs based on CELLSEARCH system with the heterogeneity caused by methodological inconsistencies being avoided.

Key words: Breast cancer, Circulating tumor cells （CTCs）, CELLSEARCHTM system, Clinical study