An automatic method of diagnosing pathologies of distal parts of limbs of a quadruped is based on the processing (101-109) of thermographic images of such limbs. The processing includes the following steps: identifying (103, 104), in each thermographic image and for each limb concerned by the diagnosis, an area containing the distal part, and extracting an identified image of the distal part from said area； validating (104) identified images complying with predetermined criteria as images utilisable for diagnostic purposes； extracting (105) features that are significant for the detection of the presence and kind of pathology from the validated images； and classifying (106) the distal part of a limb as unaffected by pathologies or as affected by a specific pathology on the basis of such features. There are also provided an apparatus and information technology product containing program codes for implementing the method when loaded into a processing device.
