Purpose Brain plasticity is a common phenomenon in nerve injury patients.It plays an important role in the physiopathology and development of diseases and is the scientific basis for treatment of some nerve injury disease.In this study,we investigate the brain plasticity in patients with early onset of facial nerve injury using fMRI.Materials and methods Twenty-three patients of Bells palsy(BP)with duration less than 14 days and twenty-three healthy controls were recruited in this study.MRI scan included task related and resting-state functional imaging performed on a 3T MR scanner(Magnetom Verio,Siemens,Germany).Tasks applied in this study included left/right hand movement and facial movement.Task related fMRI were analyzed by SPM8 with threshold of p < 0.05,FEW corrected,resting state fMRI were analyzed by DPARSFA with threshold of p<0.005 uncorrected,cluster level p<0.05 FWE corrected.Results There is no significant difference between the age and gender in patient and control groups(p = 0.59).Task result: We found contralateral S1M1 and bilateral SMA were evoked in left/right hand movement.We compared the result between the two groups,but didnt find any significant differences.Mouth moving was only applied in 19 healthy subjects,we found bilateral S1M1 and SMA were evoked in this task.Resting state Regional homogeneity(ReHo)result:A two-sample t-test was performed to explore the ReHo differences between the two groups.The result showed decreased regional coherence at bilateral S1M1 area in BP patients compared with controls.Its interesting to note that only a little part of the contralateral ReHo result was overlap with the facial area,most part of the result was overlap with the hand area,even upper hand area.The ipsilateral ReHo result was overlap with hand and upper hand area.We found only the ipsilateral side ReHo value was significant associate with patients duration(p=0.007).Conclusions An early change in brain cortex can be detected by using resting-state ReHo before the task-related imaging where the previous study found the cortical reorganization happen.Resting-state study of cortical reorganization may hold the potential to make an early diagnose and early treatment strategy.