Introduction. Breast cancer is the most frequent neoplasm among women. That is the reason why scientists all over the world are attempting to improve early detection methods of this particular malignancy. Aim. The most common and most widely used examination methods for screening for and detecting breast cancer is presented herein. Material and methods. This review was performed according to systematic literature search of three major bibliographic databases. Results. Available data suggest that incidence and mortality in high-resource countries has been declining whereas incidence and mortality in low-resource countries has been increasing. Conclusion. The role of a physician is to select the most suitable one for each patient in order to obtain the best result. No matter the method however, between 2005 and 2011, the 5-year relative survival was found to be 89%. This is thought to be due to both the increase in utilization of population-wide screening, as well as advances in treatment.