Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is the ninth leading cause of mortality in the world while it is the most prevalent infection which is ranked abolve HIV/AIDS. In Malaysia, tuberculosis is still a public health problem. Sabah State on Malaysian Borneo had 20-30% of total TB cases of the country. In Sabah, case notification rate of almost 200 per 100,000 population was still present in the last 10 years. Hotspots are defined as TB notification rate more than 100/100.000 in a district or TB notification rate more than 100/100,000 in the squatters’ area. In this study, cycle threshold (ct) values in GeneXpertMTB/RIF (Xpert) were tried to be correlated with growth in Mycobacterim growth indicator tubes (MGIT) by measurement of time to detection (TTD). Methods: Sputum samples from six hotspots of Kota Kinabalu were studied by Xpert as well as MGIT culture after processing of sputum samples. The correlation between Mean ct value of Xpert and TTD in MGIT was analysed by using IBM SPSS Statistic 25 and the statistical test used was Pearson Correlation test. Results: The results of Xpert indicated 35 of 204 sputum samples were pos-itive whereas only one sample was rifampicin resistant. The mean ct values were very low, low and medium in all the hotspots with sputum from one hotspot showed medium ct values predominantly. The sputum from remaining hotspots showed mainly very low and low ct values. MGIT results showed no growth in five samples with two very low, two low and one medium mean ct values. Conclusion: The finding indicated that there were correlations be-tween mean ct values of Xpert and TTD in MGIT with a few exceptions.