The development of noninvasive imaging techniques for the accurate diagnosis of progressive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is of great clinical significance and has always been desired. Herein, a hepatocellular carcinoma cell-targeting fluorescent magnetic nanoparticle (NP) was obtained by conjugating near-infrared fluorescence to the surface of Fe 3O 4 (NIRF-Fe 3O 4) NPs, followed by coating the lipids consisting of tumoral hepatocytes-targeting polymer (Gal-P 123). This magnetic NP (GPC@NIRF-Fe 3O 4) with superparamagnetic behavior showed high stability and safety in physiological conditions. In addition, GPC@NIRF-Fe 3O 4 achieved more specific uptake of human liver cancer cells than free Fe 3O 4 NPs. Importantly, with superpara-magnetic iron oxide and strong NIR absorbance, GPC@NIRF-Fe 3O 4 NPs demonstrate prominent tumor-contrasted imaging performance both on fluorescent and T 2-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) imaging modalities in a living body. The relative MR signal enhancement of GPC@NIRF-Fe 3O 4 NPs achieved 5.4-fold improvement compared with NIR-Fe 3O 4 NPs. Therefore, GPC@ NIRF-Fe 3O 4 NPs may be potentially used as a candidate for dual-modal imaging of tumors with information covalidated and directly compared by combining fluorescence and MR imaging.