I would suggest you look at VTK (vizualization toolkit), which you can use at least in C++ and Python. I started using it 2 month ago for the exact task you describe (manual registration of a 3D volume to its 2D projection) and found a lot of helpful resources to get started pretty quickly!

Hi Erick,

I do not know the subject you are studying or if you already know what I am talking about, but a method that has been used a lot in anatomical studies is landmark-based registration

Rohr, K.; Stiehl, H.S.; Sprengel, R.; Buzug, T.M.; Weese, J.; Kuhn, M.H., "Landmark-based elastic registration using approximating thin-plate splines," Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on , vol.20, no.6, pp.526,534, June 2001

There is a also freeware software called Landmark that works very well http://www.idav.ucdavis.edu/research/EvoMorph

Hope it helps,

Viviana

3DSlicer could also be a good option. Good luck!

Hi Erick, you can also start using MAF which is an open source GUI enabled framework. I remember this kind of application in knee replacement post-op evaluation.

M Viceconti, C Zannoni, D Testi, M Petrone, S Perticoni, P Quadrani, F Taddei, S Imboden, G Clapworthy

The multimod application framework: A rapid application development tool for computer aided medicine

computer methods and programs in biomedicine 85 (2007) 138–151

https://github.com/b3c/MAF2

Professional softwares deals with converting DICOM images to 3D model had this option (2D and 3D), for example (Amira 3D, Mimics of materialise, 3DDoctor....etc). Dental software like Simplant can also register 2 stalks of DICOM images using radioopaque markers. Finally, registeration could be done using reverse engineering softwares (manually or automatically), such as (rapidform, geomagic, vrmesh....etc).

Our VisNow system reads DICOM volumes and does non-rigid registration. Since the volume registration module is in the "advanced, not yet fully documented" library, it is not included in the basic distribution available at http://visnow.icm.edu.pl/ If interested, please contact know(@)icm.edu.pl

Checkout all the techniques wrapped by nipype, it includes a number of the above, as well as a number which were not mentioned.

You can also have a look at MITK (medical imaging interaction toolkit) www.mitk.org. There is an installer available so you can start right away importing DICOM images and using different kinds of registration algorithms. It's opensource, using ITK and VTK as base toolkits and also provides an application framework. If you're into programming it helps you to concentrate on implementing your desired features and not reinventing the wheel.