We address the problem of organ registration in augmented surgery, where the deformation of the patient’s organ is reconstructed in real-time from a partial observation of its surface. Physics- based registration methods rely on adding artificial forces to drive the registration, which may result in implausible displacement fields. In this paper, we look at this inverse problem through the lens of optimal control, in an attempt to reconstruct a physically consistent surface load. The resulting optimization problem features an elastic model, a least-squares data attachment term based on orthogonal projections, and an admissible set of surface loads defined prior to reconstruction in the mechanical model. After a discussion about the existence of solutions, we analyze the necessary optimality conditions and use them to derive a suitable optimization algorithm. We implement an adjoint method and we test our approach on multiple examples, including the so-called Sparse Data Challenge. We obtain very promising results, that illustrate the feasibility of our approach with linear and nonlinear models.