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Figure 1. Illustration of current applications of CTC technologies. The CTCs exit the primary tumor and intravasate into the bloodstream. CTCs are enriched through various CTC isolation technologies such as size, density, immunomagnetic and CTC-Chip. Detection methods are utilized to detect CTCs based on phenotypic, genotypic and transcriptional analysis. The clinical applications of isolated and detected CTCs. The CTC count is associated with the potential of patient’s survival. CTCs can be good chemotherapy monitoring markers for predicting drug sensitivity/resistance in preclinical and clinical settings. CTC: circulating tumor cells; FACS: fluorescence activated cell sorting; LC-MS: liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometry; FISH: fluorescence in situ hybridization; CGH: comparative genomic hybridization; NGS: next-generation sequencing; PCR: polymerase chain reaction; qRT-PCR: quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction