Malignant tumors pose a serious threat to mankind health and life. As a result, early diagnosis is very important. In recent years, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy has shown enormous development potential of cancer diagnosis. Compared with traditional methods, this technology has apparent advantages in the aspects of accuracy, rapidity, noninvasion, in situ, cheapness, automation, replication, without pretreatment and early diagnosis at the molecular level. This paper summarized study progress that FTIR technology applied in diagnosis of respiratory system tumor, digestive system tumor, urinary genital system tumor, brain tumor, skin tumor and blood system tumor, and combined with the international present state of clinical medicine, spectroscopy and chemometrics, five prospects were put forward: expand the sample size and undertake multi-center study; combined with endoscopy and puncture biopsy to guide real-time in situ diagnosis and biopsy during surgery; further automated; find more efficient chemometric methods; the identification of individual parameters has yet to be confirmed by further studies. With the further development and improvement of FTIR technology, it will become an important method for the diagnosis of malignant tumors, and may even as a routine screening tool applied to stage and grade the tumors.