Plotting hazard ratios from spline analysis with an interaction term

Please, I want to perform an interaction spline analysis for age (continuous) and Quartiles (categorical). My outcome is a survival outcome (incident stroke).
The focus is to compare Q4 to Q1 and allow hazard ratio to vary across age (continuous variable).

I fitted the model as;

spline.1 <- cph(Surv(years, stroke) ~  rcs(Age,3) + Q + rcs(Age, 3)%ia%Q , 
                      data = mydata)

Now I want to plot the hazard ratios and their confidence intervals across age.

I used the Predict function and had this output (first 10 observations); first panel of attache figure
spline.1_pred<-Predict(spline.1,Age,ref.zero=TRUE,fun=exp) ;

Dr. Harrell had advised that I use the contrast function, which I used.
However, the output I get from the contrast seems to be way different from what I get from the Predict function. Also, even though I specified the fun=exp in the contrast function, the outputs do not seem to be on the anti-log scale.
Below is the code I used for the contrast and the output. I added the exponentiated versions of the contrast estimates and their confidence intervals too.

contrast_spline.1 <-contrast(spline.1, list(Q="Quartile 1", Age=21:96), 
                             list(Q="Quartile 4", Age=21:96),fun=exp)

## Getting the data and exponentiating

contrast_spline_df <- as.data.frame(contrast_spline.1[c('Age','Contrast','Lower','Upper')]) %>% 
  mutate(Contrast_ex=exp(Contrast),Lower_ex=exp(Lower),Upper_ex=exp(Upper))

First 10 observations (second panel of the attached figure):

From the exponentiated estimates and confidence intervals for about the same age, the two (Predict and contract) yield very different estimates and CIs.

My questions are;

What am I doing wrong in the contrast function?
Is it appropriate to go with the results from the Predict function?

Secondly, I would be working with MICE data (10 imputed data) so I tried to fit the model to all the 10 imputed datasets and pool the results but I get an error when I try that.

This is the code I used:

spline.11 <- with(imputed_data,cph(Surv(MI_YrsFU, chd17) ~  rcs(Age,3) + 
                                         Q + rcs(Age, 3)%ia%Q ))

spline.11_pooled <- summary(pool(spline.11), conf.int = T)

The error I receive when I pool the results is;
Error: $ operator is invalid for atomic vectors

How best can I work with the imputed data using cph function.

Thank you.

Just related to the multiple imputation part, rms wants you to use fit.mult.impute and doesn’t know about pool.

Thank you, Dr. Harrell. The fit.mult.impute handled the multiple imputations.

Please, I would appreciate any help on the prediction part.

Thanks!

Hello Dr. Farrell,
Please, about my question to compare Q4 to Q1 and allow hazard ratio to vary across age from the interaction spline analysis with age and quartiles of ancestry, this is the code I am using.
I would appreciate it if you could verify that I am doing everything right.
Thank you

## Model
fit.str <- fit.mult.impute(Surv(years, stroke) ~  rcs(Age,3) + Q + rcs(Age, 3)%ia%Q , fitter = cph,
                          xtrans =imputed_data , data = raw_data)

##Predict
contrast_spline.1 <-contrast(fit.str, list(Q="Quartile 4", Age=22:96), 
                             list(Q="Quartile 1", Age=22:96))

contrast_spline_df <- as.data.frame(contrast_spline.1[c('Age','Contrast','Lower','Upper')])


##PLOT of Hazard Ratios by Age
ggplot() + geom_line(data=contrast_spline_df,aes(x=Age, y=exp(Contrast)), size=1) + 
xlab("Age (in years)") + ylab("HR")+
    geom_ribbon(data=contrast_spline_df,aes(x=Age,ymin=exp(Lower),ymax=exp(Upper)),alpha=0.5) + 
  geom_hline(aes(yintercept=1), linetype="dashed", size=0.8, color="red")