Objective To compare the diagnostic value of DWI and ultrasound elastography(UE) in staging hepatic fibrosis in patients with chronic viral hepatitis B(CHB). Methods Fifteen healthy volunteers (control group) and 69 patients with CHB (disease duration more than 1 year) (patient group) were prospectively recruited. All of the subjects underwent DWI and UE experiments twice with the interval of less than 3 days. Liver ADC and shear wave velocity(SWV) values were obtained for subsequent analysis. Sixty?nine patients who had biopsy were grouped according to their pathological grading of fibrosis, from S0 to S4. One?way ANOVA was used to compare the ADC and SWV values between the five different fibrosis groups and control group. Spearman correlation analysis was used to analyze the correlations between the ADC and SWV values and those staging factors. Finally, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to compare the diagnostic performance of ADC and SWV values in discriminating different stages of hepatic fibrosis. Results Based on the pathological results, the 69 patients were reclassified to five subgroups with 11, 13, 12, 15 and 18 patients in the S0, S1, S2, S3 and S4 groups respectively. ADC values were(1.39±0.09)×10-3,(1.39±0.08)×10-3,(1.38±0.10)×10-3,(1.20±0.06)×10-3,(1.12±0.07)×10-3 and(1.01±0.07)×10-3mm2/s for the control group and stages S0 to S4 respectively.SWV values were(1.17±0.07),(1.16±0.08),(1.23±0.10),(1.48±0.14),(1.85±0.14)and(1.97±0.12)m/s for stages S0 to S4 and the control group respectively. Statistically significant differences were observed among them (P<0.01). Both ADC (r=-0.894,P<0.01) and SWV (r=0.904,P<0.01) values were highly correlated with the stages of liver fibrosis. The area under ROC(AUC) for predicting fibrosis stages (≥S1, ≥S2, ≥S3 and S4) with ADC values was 0.893, 0.991, 0.966 and 0.952 respectively. Accordingly, the AUC for SWV values were 0.937, 0.993, 0.994 and 0.914. Conclusions The two imaging methods of DWI and UE showed good and similar diagnostic performance in discriminating the different stages of hepatic fibrosis.