To investigate the efficacy of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) combined with peripheral blood squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCC-Ag) of women for diagnosing their preoperative clinical staging of cervical cancer, and to study its value for predicting the prognosis of the women. Methods: 150 women with cervical cancer who admitted to the hospital for cervical cancer surgery (in study group) and 20 healthy women undergoing physical examinations (in control group) from September 2016 to March 2021 were selected as the research subjects. All the women in the two groups were given DWI examination and peripheral blood SCC-Ag detection. The women in the study group received surgical treatment. The prognosis of the women with cervical cancer within 3 years after surgery was recorded and were divided into group A (the women with good prognosis) and group B (the women with poor prognosis). The value of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of DWI and the peripheral blood SCC-Ag level of the women were compared between the two groups. Kappa test was used to evaluate the consistency between the preoperative clinical staging by DWI and the clinical pathological staging of cervical cancer of the women. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the ADC value of DWI combined with the peripheral blood SCC-Ag level of the women with cervical cancer for predicting their prognosis within 3-years after surgery. Results: The ADC value of the women with cervical cancer had decreased with their staging of cervical cancer increased, and the SCC Ag level of the women with cervical cancer had increased (all P<0.05). 150 women in the study group were followed for 2.5-7.1 years, and the median duration of the follow-up was 3.0 years. There were 33 (22.0%) cases with poor prognosis. The ADC value (0.90±0.24) of the women with poor prognosis was significantly lower than that (1.21±0.21) of the women with good prognosis. The peripheral blood SCC-Ag level (11.07±1.72 ng/ml) of the women with poor prognosis was significantly higher than that (7.72±1.43 ng/ml) of patients with good prognosis (all P<0.05). The kappa value of the pathology result or the DWI value combined with SCC-Ag level of the women for diagnosing their preoperative clinical staging of cervical cancer was 0.7790 (95%CI 0.7185-0.9655, P=0.000), and the consistency was good. ROC analysis showed that the area under the curve (AUC) of the peripheral blood SCC-Ag level and the ADC value of DWI of the women for assessing their prognosis with 3 years after the cervical cancer surgery were 0.936±0.021 and 0.948 ±0.018, and the AUC of the peripheral blood SCC-Ag level combined with the ADC value of DWI of the women for assessing their prognosis was 0.956±0.018, and which was the highest. Conclusion: DWI combined with the peripheral blood SCC-Ag level of the women has good efficacy for diagnosing their preoperative clinical staging of cervical cancer, and which has higher predictive efficiency for the prognosis of the women within 3 years after cervical cancer surgery.