A Cauchy problem for the elliptic equation with variable coefficients is considered. This problem is severely ill-posed. Then, we need use the regularization techniques to overcome its ill-posedness and get a stable numerical solution. In this paper, we use a modified Tikhonov regularization method to treat it. Under the a-priori bound assumptions for the exact solution, the convergence estimates of this method are established. Numerical results show that our method works well.