Detection and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) with microfluidic chips has critical significance in cancer prognosis especially the enumeration.Here, we present a microfluidic chip with micro-ellipse structures to enumerate CTCs through a simple filtration process based on physical differences of size and deformability.It consists of microfuidic slits in series with gap sizes reducing from the upstream to the downstream.Capture efficiency comes out to be a robust yield (> 90%).To clinically validate the device, the microfluidic chip was utilized to detect and capture CTCs from breast cancer and non-small-cell lung cancer patients after blood lysed with positive for all.It is a promising platform about the future development for clinical enumeration of metastasis, evaluating effectiveness of cancer therapy such as chemotherapy and pharmacological responses.