Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare type of breast cancer with low incidence, very high malignancy and rapid clinical progress. Despite that the prognosis of inflammatory breast cancer has been greatly improved, its 5-year survival rate is still less than 50%. There are many difficulties and challenges in diagnosis and treatment of inflammatory breast cancer. In this paper, the authors extract the current status and research progress of inflammatory breast cancer in terms such as epidemiology, pathobiology, imaging diagnosis and multi-disciplinary comprehensive treatment, so as to provide references for clinical choice.