To explore the pathogenesis of Bell's palsy using diffusion tensor image.

To explore the pathogenesis of Bell's palsy using the diffusion tensor image on 3.0 T MR. The healthy people and the patients with Bell's palsy underwent intraparotid facial nerve scanning by using the DTI and T1 structural sequence at 3.0 T MR. The raw DTI data were performed affine transformation and nonlinear registration in the common MNI152_T1 space and resampled to the 0.4 mm voxel size. A group of 4 spherical seed regions were placed on the intratemporal facial nerves in the common space, bilaterally and symmetrically. The DTI data in the common space were used to track the intratemporal facial nerve fibers by using TrackVis and its Diffusion Toolkit. Each tractography was used to construct the maximum probability map (MPM) according to the majority rule. The fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity (AD) and radial diffusivity (RD) were calculated and extracted on the basis of MPM. For healthy people, there was no significant difference in FA, MD, RD and AD of bilateral facial nerves. For patients with Bell's palsy, there was no significant difference in AD, there was significant difference in FA, MD and RD between the affected nerve and the healthy nerve (P < 0.02). This study showed that the myelin sheath injury of the intratemporal facial nerve is the main cause of Bell's palsy. Most neural axons are not damaged. The results may explain the pathogenesis of the Bell's palsy, which is self-limited for most cases.